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Lunch today was at Yo Sushi.

It seemed the best choice because I’ve been on a diet this past month and YS is just about the only place I can pig out without feeling guilty. There are only so many times a week that I can eat a chicken salad sandwich without sobbing in public.

So anyway, I ate sushi. So tasty. So healthy etc.

Now the place has only been open since June. Roughly around the time I returned to Newcastle. Seeing as my sushi-loving girlfriend was following me to these shores, I was delighted that the city had filled what had previously been a raw fish-free zone.

Now I don’t know if this is normal, but the YS in Newcastle is in the middle of a department store. The Fenwicks Food Hall to be precise. Sandwiched in between a Pret a Manger and various upscale delistuffs. Old people like Fenwicks.

Certainly, while various restaurants have dabbled in Japanese food, this is the first sushi restaurant, to my knowledge, that has opened in the city.

Now you Southern types might chortle in your lattes at this one (and if you do then you’re the smug tossers we always suspected you were) but this is something of a novelty for Newcastle.

There are other things we do have: fresh air, space, houses with more than one room for under half a million, no Boris Johnson, etc but this is a first.

So the triple novelty of the foodhall setting, food that moves and the whole raw fish thing, makes it something of a curiosity.

This lunchtime I was photographed eating on two occasions, had my shoulder peered over three times, but was, for the most part, just treated somewhere between an art installation and the inhabitant of a zoo.

All in all, I can never work out whether it makes me feel very cool and cosmopolitan or a bit of a prat.

A quick Google through the blogs and Meri Williams has had similar experiences:

 …I evidently have a “ask me about sushi, I’ll explain” aura about me - every time we go NEAR the Yo Sushi in Newcastle I end up explaining what the food is and how the conveyor belt system works to every 50+ in Fenwicks …

Meanwhile, Jason’s been there too.

Slightly embarassing (from a North East perspective) is this picture here from Brown Brogues but I’d blame it on patronising Yo Sushi marketing people rather than Geordie ignorance.