Wasai | SA Weekend restaurant review
This hidden gem produces precisely cut sushi, delicate tempura and soulful hotpots – all at a family-friendly price.
Food & Wine
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Wasai is the Cameron Green of Japanese restaurants. A great all-rounder. It can bowl, it can bat, and it’s a gun in the field, just like the young star of Australian cricket.
In this case, however, the all-round talent we’re talking about is for producing precisely cut sushi, delicate tempura and soulful hotpots, from the one kitchen. Quickly. And at an affordable, family-friendly price. Owner/chef Tsuyoshi Yumita take a bow.
Yumita trained as a sushi chef in Japan before coming to Adelaide and running the kitchen at the old Genki restaurant in Field St, just around the corner from the bright lights of Chinatown.
Here he met now-wife Alix, who was waiting tables, and the couple eventually took over the business and renamed it Wasai. They gave the space a makeover, doing most of the work themselves, and devised a new menu, featuring all the styles of cooking above and a fair bit more. That was more than 15 years back but, despite continuing popularity, it somehow maintains a relatively low profile. Perhaps the off-Broadway location has something to do with it, though that isn’t a problem for a host of Friday night market shoppers who make a Wasai meal part of their weekly ritual.
The dining room is a step up from Gouger’s laminate brigade, though not exactly stylish or contemporary. Chairs are dark timber, various Japanese-themed prints hang on the walls and the central bar carries an impressive row of large sake bottles. A change to the beige and brown paintjob is on the cards which is a blessing.
Not that many of those filling the tables around us seem in the least fussed about decor. Their focus is squarely on the various contents of impressive sushi and sashimi boats that are packed to the gunwales like overcrowded life rafts. Indeed, looking around, sushi in all its variations – rolls, nigiri, aburi (torched) – is far and away the most popular choice, perhaps not surprising given the number of outlets opening around town at the moment.
Our order includes a sampling of sushi nigiri, three types of raw seafood slices (kingfish, scallop and glossy, deep scarlet tuna) draped simply over little plinths of rice with accompaniments of pickled ginger and decent, nasal clearing wasabi.
But we also include a mix of cooked dishes and this leads to a problem when everything is dropped on the table at once and we face the likelihood of food becoming cold/soggy/limp by the time it is eaten. Fortunately, a second waiter with an experienced eye identifies the issue and sends a few plates back from whence they came.
That way we can focus on polishing off the delicate fried blocks of agedashi tofu before they sit too long in a warm pool of deeply flavoured soy-based broth and turn to mush. Spring onions and fine strips of toasted nori complete a dish that makes a perfect starter.
Flakes of bonito swaying back and forth as if catching a magical breeze sit atop crisp-skinned takoyaki puffs that don’t contain enough octopus to give them their signature chew.
The combination tempura, on the other hand, is exemplary, the prawns, batons of fish and slices of eggplant, pumpkin and starchy sweet potato all perfectly cooked inside a sheath of gossamer batter without a hint of residual frying. At $23, it’s a steal.
The eel and rice bowl delivers exactly what the name promises, a treat for anyone who loves the rich, oily meat and gelatinous skin of the fearsome marine creature, here given some extra oomph with a miso glaze. Count me in.
Finally, beef sukiyaki is a tangle of glass noodles, tofu, cabbage and other vegetables, topped with shavings of beef, all submerged in a soy-based broth that is, as tradition dictates, very sweet. Some may prefer the spicy soup of the jigoku.
Wasai offers value for money and consistent cooking, even when our visit happened to coincide with one of the rare occasions that Yumita was away and not in the kitchen. As any good cricketer knows, timing is everything.
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