Last year, Korean-Australian chefs Changu Park and Jihwan Lee combined their love of Japanese cuisine with their engineering expertise to build a restaurant that “gives people a fine-dining experience at an affordable price”. Better still, they engineered the prices to work for the have-lesses. So, will it be the pork-loin katsu covered in molten cheddar or the gleaming sashimi platter?
Lee handles the raw fish and hangs them whole in the dry-ageing fridge next to the sushi bar. Tuna, kingfish, and salmon sashimi arrive wreathed in dry-ice fog against a sculpted backdrop of cucumber and radish, and gently pickled mackerel dipped in house-made mushroom soy sauce is particularly pleasing. Park’s remit, meanwhile, is the cooked dishes, where he draws on Nordic and Mediterranean kitchen experience.
Charcoal-grilled calamari is complemented by spiced yuzu-kosho, tarragon and brown butter for a savoury, herbaceous and rich result. For lovers of fried food, the cheese katsu is a must, with a panko-crumbed deep-fried pork loin cradling small lakes of melted cheddar. Affordable fancy Japanese: a culinary oxymoron no more.
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