The inside guide to eating and drinking in Melbourne. Since 2005.

Heirloom looks great but the food needs to be simpler. The best French chefs are Japanese nowadays, they say. But they aren’t French they are Japanese. They are just cooking French-style with the addition of Japanese ingredients. Meanwhile, the best French chefs are now open in Japan. They rock. Or at least Michel Bras does, [...]

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What do you say to a celebrity when you meet them? It’s a question raised by the Freakanomics guys and what that I often face. When Rachael Griffiths pats my gimpy dog, or my grumpy dog tries to savage one of Guy Pearce’s Basenji, I just make polite conversation and try and treat them normally [...]

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Q I booked Tempura Hajime for dinner in April. My husband and I enjoy Japanese. However, we went to Yu-u a few weeks ago and were completely and utterly underwhelmed. I think I read somewhere on your site about it having the same owners or something ? Nice dining setting but very uninspiring food. I [...]

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I instantly like it: Ichi Ni (03 9534 1212), the Izakaya, a Japanese style tavern/pub with food, which opened last night  next to The Espy by the owners of The Espy Vince Sofo and Paul Adamo. It rocks. Yes, there were some blips in service on the first night. But we weren’t even aware that our [...]

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The best and best value food in Surfers Paradise has long been the tiny Korean and Japanese joints hidden in its low-rent 1970s shopping malls. But it is also worth escaping the main tourist drags for Chevron Island where soba Master Yoshinory Shibazaki & his wife Keiko are bringing Japanese food on the Gold Coast [...]

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Saki tasting at Misuzu’s Okay I know what some of yu are going to say – he’s got balls to go saki tasting. Wrong. I have octopus balls – on my plate to be precise and they are very nice thank you (if not a bit chewy in the middle). Misuzu’s (3-7 Victoria Avenue, Albert [...]

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For now we can only live through the Tempura Hajime experience through other people’s meals and blogs. Matthew at Esoteric Rabbit managed to get in before The Age review and had a good chat to the frinedly and very modest owners: “They apparently pleaded with the paper not to publish the review, which was of [...]

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News come via a friend of a friend: “I just made a booking… at Tempura Hajime (the place you told me about) earliest date. August 2nd.” Wow!

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Sashimi and eel in the foreground. There is sometime that draws me back time and time again to the stripped back aesthetic of a good Japanese restaurant. It is the antidote to the worst of what try-hard restaurants offer. I’m talking about the over elaborate try-hard food that has become the vogue in some of [...]

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The hands on approach with Wagyu I was invited back to a wagyu lunch at Jamon (3 Murphy St, South Yarra, Vic 3141 +61 3 9804 5710) by the chef and owner Charles a couple of months ago and should have posted this earlier. His point, which I wrote about for The Australian’s Indulgence section, [...]

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