Food Review: Yahi

It doesn't matter where you are in the world, the mass transit terminal in the city centre will often be the first place you'll eat - travel prepares the taste buds, and whether it's the lady in the Glasgow Central Station M&S offering you plastic glasses so you can drink your wine on the train (so enlightened!) to whatever bastardized version of local cuisine you can grab from a passing vendor, you can get an idea of what's on the menu for the duration of your stay.

Walk by the bars offering Guinness (brewed in Dublin, by an English based multinational), the ropey looking greasy spoon and a BBQ joint that's lost its way, and you'll find the wonderful Yahi - we first stumbled in when we found a member of staff dressed as an Orang-utan, handing out half price coffee vouchers. Sadly, he wasn't saying, ‘you'll go ape for our café', but you can't have everything.

There's two extremes of coffee preparation here in Belfast. One relies heavily on the automated machines and features a steam wand that hasn't been cleaned since the beforetimes, when everyone was so rich we paid to have tiny fish eat the dirt off our feet.

The other features beards and glasses and measuring the draw using both time and a tiny drug dealer sized set of scales. Yahi doesn't go that far, but its fair-trade Orang-utan coffee and efficient, well trained staff knock the stuffing out of any espresso jockeys on this side of town at least.

The coffee gives a clue to how Yahi operate - the Sumatran blend was developed to help endangered apes in Asia, by safeguarding their rainforest habitats. The food is all locally sourced as well, with Fivemiletown goats cheese on the menu and homemade granola.
The first thing you'll notice is that Yahi is definitely at the high end of the price point - but, hey, we've got a Greggs now and if you want to spend 30p on a sausage roll, good luck working out where the meat came from.

Treat yourself to one of Yahi's efforts, stuffed full of Belly Pork and bacon, served with homemade ketchup to boot.
If you're feeling really hungry, we can recommend the Clonakilty Bahn-Mi, a breakfast baguette that picks up influences equally from Cork as Saigon, with black pudding, fried egg and pickled coleslaw. Again it's on what you might consider the high end of the scale, but when a Big Mac meal can set you back the guts of seven quid these days you can't go far wrong. And we didn't need to eat again until gone 7.

It's an example of the bold flavours and risk-taking that elevate the café above the humdrum, run of the mill offerings that bore us to death.

There's no nod to the unhelpful fad of raw 'clean' eating here, rather good product, well presented and served with a smile. And isn't that what it's all about?

Shane Horan

Yahi can be found in Great Northern Mall at the Europa Bus Station. Keep up to date at FB/YAHIcafe and T@yahicafe.