Approach from one direction, and the location of Jöro looks like a makeshift shelter on the edge of some wasteland. Shipping containers are piled high, windowless and bleak, there are sprawling weeds and – as an almost decorative piece of abandon – there’s a discarded supermarket trolley. But there’s one clue to endeavours within the hoarded metal: a short, fat, worm of metal tubing… the pipe of an extractor fan.
Around to the other side and you pass frosted glazing suggestive of activity and then a discreet entrance with a list of businesses operating within this ‘building’ called Krynkl. Krynkl is a space for start-ups on the winding, industrial Shalesmoor road of Sheffield, within which you’ll find the beating heart of the most intoxicatingly pleasurable little eating house that I’ve encountered in ages.
I may be late to the party, as Jöro opened in 2016, but this is an exciting year for the place, founded by Cambridge-born chef Luke French and his wife Stacey Sherwood-French, as towards the end of 2022 the establishment will move and be the flagship restaurant of a swanky new development in the city centre. French will retain this space for a street-food project. The future looks bright, but it’s tantalising to dine in the space where in years to come they’ll say the magic started.
Midweek, in the second lunchtime sitting, and one of six services provided by some eight chefs for a modest 25-odd covers, I submit to the eight-course tasting menu.
There are nooks and crannies of tables cut into the containers, grey walls, modern art, shelves of cookbooks and wine bottles and thumping rap. Volume up high the way I like it. Music’s to be heard, not abused as background drear. I gather that on flat nights, when the diners seem a little muted, the boys at the pass whack on heavy metal.