Yoshimi Hayakawa

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They were the Busby Babes of the West Coast, Galway’s greatest culinary alumni.
Sometime late in the twentieth century and on into the twenty-first century, a team of cooks from here and everywhere – Australasia, Europe, Asia – converged on, and worked in, Sheridan’s Cheesemongers in Galway.
They used to gather together on a Friday night, upstairs above the Cheesemongers, to cook for each other and to drink some wines. To see them together was to see culinary fusion meet culinary fission, a bunch of guys and girls trading ideas, secrets, influences. They seemed to pull the dishes they cooked together down from the ether.
Yoshimi Hayakawa, of Galway’s Wa Café, was one of that team. You would meet her early on Saturday morning, in the Galway market, selling her meticulously crafted sushi rolls from a little box perched on a little table: jewels of colour, jewels of creativity. Back in 2004 we wrote that “this is some of the very best sushi you can find”. We were wrong: it was the best sushi you could find.
Ms Hayakawa opened Kappa-ya on Middle Street, with Jimichi Yoshiyagawa, and they hung their manifesto above the door: “Cooking is a kind of instant art: it is made to disappear...”
To savour it, you needed only “an appreciation of the beauty of the moment and an awareness of the transient, ephemeral nature of life”.
Kappa-ya brought wabi-sabi to Ireland, that amorphous and magnificent vision of philosophy and order. Today, Ms Hayakawa ushers wabi-sabi forth every day in Wa Café. She brings it to life with her technique for nigiri sushi, a careful, nuanced discipline which we tried to capture on film. But she speaks best of all about the spirit of sushi, the spirit of learning and humility and reverent wonder for the life that is in everything we see about us. “Wa” means: Japan; Japanese; harmony; and circle. In realty, Wa Café is nothing less that an archipelago of the spirit of sushi, somehow morphed into life on the far west coast of Ireland. Ms Hayakawa is still pulling food magic from the ether: instant art.

+353 91 895850
www.wacafe.net