Skosh, York, restaurant review: Enjoy the little things in life

My tattered copy of Radcliffe &  Riley’s Britpop-English Dictionary defines “skosh” as “an exclamation of defiance and bewilderment”, citing its use by Rick Witter of Shed Seven at a press conference in 1994, upon being asked several times by an increasingly insistent Miranda Sawyer to name his favourite soup.

So when I learnt of a hotly praised new restaurant in York bearing the same name, I assumed it was going to be some sort of theme place where the waiters all had bandy legs and wore anoraks indoors, and addressed you mockingly as Our Kid, to a soundtrack of spiralling Sixties-influenced grooves. But no.

It turns out the word is a mangling of the Japanese sukoshi, meaning “a little bit” – though how much of a little bit, and whether it’s applicable to degree as well as quantity, is the subject of some debate.

I have a friend who speaks Japanese, but we fell out earlier this year and I didn’t want my first overture to her to be me asking for a favour; so I looked it up on the internet instead, which is brilliant as we know, but can be a shade, let’s say, uncurated.

Consequently I'm still a bit fuzzy on sukoshi, save that I do know the “U” is unvoiced, as in netsuke, those hideous little ivory things that that book’s about, which are pronounced “netski”. So Skosh is not as badly mangled as all that, maybe.

The restaurant is on Micklegate, York’s designated Hipster Occupation Zone, near a bike shop, a craft beer pub, a fully gentrified pub that used to be a brothel and, for that added touch of authenticity, a fully ungentrified antique shop selling, on the day of our visit, at least two pieces of Nazi memorabilia. (“To have one piece of Nazi memorabilia on sale may be counted a misfortune; to have two looks like carelessness” – Mark “Cow” Day, op. cit. p. 637)

In fact the name is a masterstroke of expectation management. It warns you that some sort of small plates policy may be in effect; and it hints that Oriental precision will be coupled with Northern passion and energy and wit to create something new and delicious. Both turn out to be true.

We were seated on high stools at a steel bar looking back into the kitchen; there are plenty of normal tables in the main body of the restaurant, but these were all booked out.

Decor is generically on trend – a dying-wasp colour scheme, abstract art, Scandi modern chairs etc. Little laughing Buddhas and the obligatory bespoke crockery, piled up neatly at the pass, liven things up a bit – but really it’s not the sort of environment that invites or rewards close attention.

That’s more expectation management, I suppose: you’re primed to understand that It’s All About The Food.

Our server quickly won our hearts by suggesting a logical and almost – dare one say it – course-like order in which to bring our dishes: three savoury nibbly ones, two fishy ones, a meaty one and a veggie one, all roughly and gently ascending in scale and price (though nothing’s more than £15). 

This meant, among other things, that we could plan our wine strategy, choosing glassfuls from a keenly-priced and almost hysterically imaginative list: Dorset fizz for the nibbles, pecorino (“The wine that thinks it’s a cheese!”) from Chieti for the fish and a dark, heady tannat from Uruguay for tender but mercifully mush-free ox cheeks and confit-rich Jersey Royals, both perfumed with truffle. 

Everything was good, a couple of things (those ox cheeks; a picture-perfect dish of raw brill with discs of turnip, white soy, tofu cream and a few fine-chopped herbs) just preposterously good.

“Cod’s roe cream” tasted pretty much like taramasalata, to be sure, but was whipped to a taut, quivering lightness. Cauliflower pakoras sat on a vivid paste of green chilli, coriander and coconut, perfumed and astringent.

One or two ingredients were lost in the melée. Sometimes, too, they tried a little too hard with the presentation: grilled eel and mackerel “kabayaki” – one of those Japanese words that sounds oddly Geordie – comes with the letters “S-K-O-S-H” excised from five slices of daikon with a cookie cutter alongside it; they might as well have gone the whole hog and spelt out “PLEASE POST ME ON SOCIAL MEDIA, ACCOMPANIED BY A RELEVANT HASHTAG”. Though I doubt the UK’s daikon suppliers would stand the strain for long.

But in general, this was an absolute paragon of a 21st-century restaurant: great meat, vegetables and fish from the UK, accented, always skillfully and imaginatively, never gratuitously – well, hardly ever – with interesting ingredients from farther afield. And everything was done with pace and charm and a sort of sense of fun.

Unexpectedly, we met some friends. They’re getting married in York this summer; the place where they’re having the reception has more generous terms for conferences than for weddings, so they’re thinking of giving everybody lanyards and making her dad do a PowerPoint presentation instead of a speech.

After lunch we all holed up in that craft beer pub down the road for a while; to tell the truth the remainder of our time in York was not wildly productive.

I had wanted to see the saucy William Ettys, or Etties, in the art gallery, but that went by the board. Still, we managed to squeeze in half an hour at the National Railway Museum before it closed, which is something.

As for Rick Witter, he’s still on the road; though since the disgrace of Gary Glitter, his services to music have been increasingly outweighed by his contribution to the lexicon of rhyming slang.

Lunch for two: £100

98 Micklegate, York, YO1 6JX

01904 634849; skoshyork.co.uk