Miso and Sushi, Haymarket Terrace

At first glance, Miso and Sushi seems to epitomise all the woeful stereotypes of your greasily mediocre local takeaway-cum-restaurant – a dinky hole-in-the-wall tucked away on the corner of Haymarket Terrace featuring some highly dubious décor (case in point – one of those moving waterfall pictures – although they have a much niftier website which you can see here). However, as the majority of cookie-cutter bar-restos on George Street demonstrate with robotic panache, it’s not the packaging but the present inside that really counts. Pause a little longer outside Miso’s uninspiring façade and a gem starts to wink out at you. I’ve ordered takeaway from here a number of times and always been very pleased, and my meal tonight was no exception.

As the name implies, the restaurant specialises in sushi but also offers Chinese food, and it is only in this latter capacity that I can comment, possessing as I do a manic lust for hot and sour soup (although I believe the sushi – in particular the dragon roll - is also meant to be excellent Note: Since writing the above have tried Dragon Roll. Can confirm it is totally sublime, and charmingly shaped into a little dragon as well). First points awarded here – despite offering two types of cuisine, the menu is in fact relatively short - often an indicator of considered and good-quality cooking.

Today, I ordered modestly, just some of the aforementioned soup and a portion of spare ribs for a speedy post-work dinner. I’ve had the soup before and today’s helping was reliably (tom) yummy as always, side-stepping the neon goo industry standard with a dish of reassuringly natural hue that was packed with lots of spice and heat. Flavour rather than chunk dominates, so it’s a lighter version than others I’ve tried, but there was still plenty of sizeable hot n sour confetti (chicken, pork, mushroom, tofu and those teeny tiny prawns) to make it a satisfying opener to my lazy supper.

And then to the ribs. Oh, themz ribs - I ate most of them standing in the kitchen with my coat still on. Located under the bluntly-named “salt and chilli” section of the menu, they were bone-suckingly moreish and did exactly what it said on the tin, red-cooked with lashings of salt, garlic and lip-tingling chilli. It wasn’t a saucy dish, as I had expected, but the pork was nonetheless soft, generously meaty and moist. You get a good number of them as well, so with a heap of plain rice you’d have more than enough for tea plus extra for leftovers.

A rather long review for such a hastily-snatched dinner, perhaps, but Miso and Sushi is such a rough diamond – emphasis firmly placed on the diamond rather than the rough – and it’s become my personal cause to get as many people through its unprepossessing doors as possible. If the autumn’s television double-whammy of X-Factor/Strictly has you glued to your sofa, you can also support from afar, for they deliver a wide selection of their sit-in menu dishes for your Saturday-night delectation as well. I’ll be at the front of the queue - not least to see what magic Miso can work on the Chinese takeaway's greatest blight and challenge: the Sweet and Sour chicken.

Long live The Other M&S!