Perched on the fourth floor of the Radisson Blu Galway, RAW offers a sushi menu that also includes a handful of cold meat and vegetable dishes. While the room retains a slightly corporate look from its previous incarnation as a meeting room, service is warm and friendly and the view from your table looks out over Lough Atalia to Galway Bay, where some of your dinner has been landed.
The menu is split into various types of sushi, such as nigiri (slices of fish on a ball of rice), maki (sushi rolls in seaweed), temaki (hand rolled cones of fish and rice) and sashimi (slices of raw fish). Prices range from €4 to €18. There’s also an interesting sushi bowl (€12) of sushi rice topped with fish including yellow fin tuna and salmon, veggies, roe and nori (seaweed). There’s an explanation of what each dish entails - useful for people new to sushi - and you can see head chef Hisashi Kumagai working away, expertly assembling your dinner.
A bowl of edamame (salty steamed soy beans) is a must-have - popping them out of their shell gives the same satisfaction as popping bubble-wrap. It’s also nice to see the price at €3, when so many places charge twice that these days. Maki options include a California roll (€8) with real crab (as opposed to dreadful processed crab sticks). There’s also a delicious spider roll - fried soft-shell crab with avocado and mustard cress - which has good, meaty crab and is the right balance of crunchy and creamy.
A plate of tuna tataki (€13) has barely seared slices of yellow fin, with a sake, soy and vinegar sauce, topped with a punchy mix of spring onion, garlic, ginger and daikon radish. The four-course set menu (€35) is a good way to try a number of dishes. It includes miso soup, and choices such as eel unagi rolls, a sashimi selection (the tuna is good - fatty but melting), a chef’s 6-piece selection of nigiri and maki, and a very good Barbary duck breast (€13), smoked and cut into thin slivers that are dark pink inside. It’s been marinated in mirin, sake and konbu (a type of kelp) and the explosion of smoky, salty, umami flavours in your mouth is quite something.
This is good spot for a date (ask for a window seat) and you can also get take out.
