Sushi Passion, Unit 30D Birmingham Indoor Market. T: 07414 654 280
7/10
From time to time, I ask readers to recommend exciting new restaurants and I generally receive somewhere between zero and two replies.
Okay, if you discount the letters written in green ink, care of HM Prison Birmingham, I’m lucky to get one reply.
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This either means not many people read my reviews, or there aren’t many good new restaurants, neither of which augurs well for this column.
Don’t be deceived. Food critics may come across as a miserable, charmless breed, but they are in fact eternal optimists, forever hopeful that the next great discovery is waiting round the corner. Without this sense of hope, restaurant reviewers would be nothing; they would be TV critics.
Hence my unbounded joy at getting a tip-off from a non-psychopath, or at least I’m fairly sure he isn’t a psychopath. It arrives from BBC Midlands Today environment and science jock David Gregory, who put me on to Sushi Passion.
I was particularly excited about David’s recommendation because it contained that magic word: sushi. Birmingham’s sushi deficit is extraordinary. You don’t need all the fingers on one hand to count the number of independent sushi outlets in the city, less still the good ones.
This strikes me as mildly bonkers because sushi is tasty, healthy and always, like they say, on trend. It doubles for both casual and posh dining. Whoever sets up a good sushi restaurant in Brum, with proper sushi chefs and a cool bar, will wake up every morning in the land of the rising profit margin.
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The San Carlo group, as reported here last week, has done it with small plates of Italian food. Sushi is merely a variation on a theme. The business model works.
And the chef to make it happen could be, er, Polish.
Yes, Brum’s master of sushi nigiri comes not from the Far East, but from Eastern Europe. His name is Adam Gllama and he looks like a veteran of Police special forces. You’d think the story couldn’t get any odder, but then it does. Adam’s six-seater restaurant (yes, six seats) is in the unlikely environs of Birmingham Indoor Market, where Sushi Passion vies for trade with a couple of local caffs.
He’s done a remarkably good job of turning the Sushi Passion unit into a colourful corner of Japan. Red lanterns hang down over the bar, where diners perch on comfortable red and stainless steel swivel chairs. Adam works inches away from the serving bar in a space about two metres square, cutting fish and constructing rolls with nori at tremendous speed.
As I scan the menu, it’s difficult to avoid the sound of an industrial saw hacking through carcasses on a counter in the next aisle. I like the edgy atmosphere but it wouldn’t be everyone’s choice, not least Adam, who is desperate for, and deserves, a more prominent city centre location.
I don’t mean this in a snobbish way. Far from it. I’m a huge advocate of restaurants at markets. Some of the best food around is served in markets, like the restaurants above the fresh produce stalls at Place Victor Hugo in Toulouse.
I haven’t been, but I am sure it’s the same in Japanese markets.
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Unfortunately, we just don’t have that culture in Birmingham, not yet anyway, so Sushi Passion is facing an uphill battle.
Adam’s plans are further restricted by the market’s limited opening hours, and he consequently misses out on a potentially lucrative evening trade.
The 40-year-odl has always been a chef but he retrained as a sushi chef 12 years ago. He’s worked in swanky places in London and in Germany and France. But he always wanted to be his own boss and refuses to compromise on the quality of his fish – or anything really. He’s engaging company but I don’t think I’d like to cross him.
Adam’s food is tremendous. There are a number of set lunches and there is an a la carte-style menu, too. I plumbed for the chef’s Rolls-Royce lunch, priced at £19.50, which showcases in particular nigiri, gunkan and Adam’s California rainbow roll.
For the nigiri, there is eel, prawn, cuttlefish, sweet prawn and octopus (and I also asked for a couple of tuna nigiri as well, because I’m like that).
Elsewhere on the stone serving plate, there is a black caviar gunkan and an almost fluorescent salmon roe (ikura), which does what Adam says it should do – and explodes sideways in your mouth.
The lunch includes miso soup and endless cups of Japanese green tea. It’s possibly the best value lunch in town.
It’s only right that I ask the chef to come up with something off the menu and he jumps at the challenge, knocking out a salmon teriyaki roll, topped with ripe mango, a spicy vegetable sauce (whose make-up he won’t divulge) and tiny crumbs of fried onion. And it’s just great, combining savoury flavours and textures in that hugely addictive way that good sushi does.
Adam runs sushi classes and is available for private functions and parties, for which he will bring along a couple of geisha girls.
If I was a Birmingham company looking for an eye-catching catering alternative, I know who I would call.
I’ve no idea how long Sushi Passion will be able to survive in its current guise at the indoor market. This sushi bar is swimming against the current. Even with a loyal following, it needs to open at night for the business to push on. Brum’s sushi Gllama boy needs a break.
I hope he gets it because in the right setting this place could fly. It’s just what the city’s dining out scene needs.