Domo, Eagle Works, 34-36 Cotton Mill Walk, Little Kelham, Sheffield
S3 8DH (0114 322 1020). Starters £6.75-£14.95, mains £10.95-£37.50, desserts £5.50- £16.50, w ines from £26.50
Among the specials on the menu at Domo, a very jolly Sardinian restaurant in Sheffield, is the Peter, a pizza topped with sliced hotdogs and chips. It has a “totally bladdered on a Friday night” vibe. It sounds like the sort of food item someone might scarf while bellowing “I bloody luv you” at their best mate, with the hefty waft of WKD Blue on their breath. It’s an image profoundly at odds with how we like to picture the Italians behaving around their dinner. Surely, for them it’s all sunshine and refinement and tasselled loafers? Wouldn’t there be outrage in Sardinia if some rackety kitchen started pelting a pizza with chips? Therefore, this must be a site-specific pizza, designed for the good people of Sheffield, and perhaps some of the less good ones, too.
Some of you will be way ahead of me, because a little research goes a long way. The sliced hotdog and chips pizza is very much a thing, and has been in Naples since the 1970s, although they like to deny responsibility by calling it a “Pizza Americana”. You can even find recipes for it online: make pizza base, top with tomato sauce, cheese, sliced hotdogs and frozen oven chips. Bake. What were you expecting? Escoffier? Take off the chips, leaving just the hotdogs, and it’s a “Pizza Viennese”, which is said to have been designed to appeal to German tourists. That’s not listed on the Domo menu, but I’m sure they’d oblige, because most things are on offer here. Either way you’ll get a very good pizza. The rugged crust is bubbled and blistered and chewy in all the right ways. The framed certificates above the hatch to the semi-open kitchen, declaring them winners in various categories of a major pizza competition, have been well earned.
We share the mamuthones, named after the Sardinian leather masks worn for the celebration of saints’ days. It comes topped with thick pieces of deliciously fatty pancetta like the best Yorkshire bacon, and crisp rosemary roast potatoes, designed to make you feel a little more sophisticated than those with a mouthful of chips. Beware the chilli oil, however enthusiastically your waiter offers it to you, and he will be enthusiastic. It’s made with reaper chillies and risks delivering a fierce burn at both ends. For the record, you can also get a margherita, a capricciosa, a diavola and so on, all priced in the low teens. They don’t just do drunk food.
And yet for all their commitment to those classics – the crisp, rustling zucchini fritti, the arancini, the platter of grilled fish, the tiramisu – there is a loose-limbed goofiness about the place. They are determined to show you a very good time, and they do. Among the starters is a bruschetta thermidor, which clearly comes from that bit of Sardinia that has been on its spendy holidays. It’s a rich, boozy and mustardy cheese on toast with generous nuggets of lobster. It takes deep wells of culinary enthusiasm to come up with something like that.
It helps that this baby-cheek-pink dish blends nicely with the decor. Domo, which opened in 2019, occupies the ground floor of a 19th-century redbrick former mill building on the Kelham Island development, just to the north of the A61. It sits amid a residential eco-complex in what is obviously Sheffield’s Scandinavian quarter. Be warned: although it’s been there a while now, cab drivers often struggle to find it. Inside, the arched ceiling of the bricked space really is painted a delicious shade of thermidor pink, shading down to something closer to terracotta on the muralled walls. There are banquettes. There are supportive chairs. It’s very comfortable.
While that lengthy menu quietly attempts to offer most things to most people, from Florentine T-bones to vegan super salads, fish and seafood is a strength. There is a carbonara, but it comes with tuna, swordfish and a dollop of caviar. Charcoal-black ravioli are filled with any lobster left over from the bruschetta, and served in a bisque the colour of the walls. We start with a plate of their salted then vinegar-marinated anchovies, cos-playing as bochorones without quite committing to the role. They are sprawled generously across an undulating sheet of ultra-thin carta di musica, with ribbons of lightly pickled onion. It’s a keenly priced plateful at £6.75. Alongside, we have deep-fried pucks of shredded skate wing, mixed with salty pecorino, lemon and parsley. They pull away from our lips into cheesy, lightly gelatinous strings. Alongside, there’s an agliata dipping sauce, honking cheerfully of garlic.
A Sardinian seafood stew arrives in its silvery bowl. The fattest of prawns, with pieces of squid, swordfish and tuna, have all been treated with due care and respect. They bob in a sauce of Booker prize-winning depth and profundity. I kid myself that, by ordering the seafood fregola, I have chosen something completely different. In truth it’s just another seafood stew, only with a ballast of dainty carbs, courtesy of the swollen beads of semolina dough which have been toasted before being introduced to the stock. There are clams and mussels in here, as there should be, lending their briny liquor to the sauce while offering up the chance to slurp at the shells. Ask for a finger bowl.
The dessert menu includes cannoli, a hot chocolate fondant and a torta della nonna, although it’s not entirely clear whose nonna is responsible for the latter. In an outbreak of searing honesty, the boss tells us these desserts are all very nice, but that they are not made by the kitchen here. The tiramisu, however, is. We should have that. We do as we are told and are rewarded with a very good, cocoa-dusted rectangle of things done right. There is mascarpone whipped into the cream, as there should be. For added fun, there’s the crunch of pine nuts and chocolate chips. The biscuits are sodden with espresso. The caffeine takes the edge off the bottle of white from Abruzzo that our waiter tells us is his favourite. I suspect he’d have said the same of whatever wine we chose. From good waiters I don’t demand truth, just convincing bursts of sincerity. That particular C-word sums up Domo. It’s utterly convincing. They want you to have a good night out. Even if it involves a pizza topped with hotdogs and chips.
News bites
The former head chef of Simon Rogan’s L’Enclume, when it won its third Michelin star, is to open his own restaurant in Manchester next spring. Former Roux Scholar Tom Barnes, who was also head chef at Rogan & Co and held a senior role at Geranium in Copenhagen, will open the 36-cover Skof inside the Hanover building on Corporation Street offering ‘an unpretentious yet ambitious dining experience’. Barnes will continue his relationship with his previous boss, as he will be getting some of his ingredients from Rogan’s farm in Cumbria.
The much-loved Malaysian restaurant Roti King in Euston, famed for its flaky roti canai, served with various curries, is to open a third outpost, following its second at the Battersea Power station development last year. The new one, which opens in December, will occupy a site on Lower Marsh in London’s Waterloo. Alongside the revered roti there will be a menu of nasi lemak, laksa and rendang, including plant-based options. Visit rotiking.com.
And a closure: the flashy Liverpool Chinese restaurant Lu Ban, headed up by British chef Dave Critchley, has closed after four years. In a statement, the restaurant said that ‘the ongoing cost of living crisis has reduced footfall to what was always a niche concept’. Combined with increased energy costs, that had made the business unsustainable. In the statement they said that anybody who had paid a deposit would be reimbursed.
Email Jay at jay.rayner@observer.co.uk or follow him on Twitter @jayrayner1
