The Mouth tries Haco and the dining trend that’s as good as Pancakes on the Rocks

There’s a Japanese word for when you leave the choices to the chef, swipe the credit card, and hope for the best. It’s “omakase”. At Haco, it works best when they temper the tempura.

Delicious 100 2022. Haco

Omakase, for those who are not great at languages, is a Japanese word which means, “I’m pretty sure this card will go through”.

Despite the sometimes eye-watering costs, though, it is also one of the best trends to hit Sydney since Pancakes on the Rocks.

Essentially it’s “chef’s choice”, and involves someone – generally a sushi master – opening up their own shop and serving whatever God and the fish market has sent his way to 10 or 12 lucky customers a night

But while generally fish-focused, it isn’t always, which is where Haco comes in with its promise of a tempura degustation of as many as 20 courses.

While just off the street, or to be more precise, alleyway, once inside Haco’s high polished concrete walls one could be several hundred metres underground in the private sushi bar of Bill Gates’s apocalypse bunker.

Haco’s bunker-style exterior. Picture: Supplied

The opening courses were some of the most fun and interesting Japanese bites we have had in a long time.

Little pearls of kombu-cured lobster, market sashimi glazed with a sea urchin sauce, and a chawanmushi – or steamed egg custard – with foie gras, torched like a little crème brulee, were worth the price of admission alone.

Haco excels with its small bites. Picture: Supplied

A sort of seaweed tart topped with prawns and then theatrically topped again at your seat with caviar eggs was perfection.

Then, the fried courses, each one delicately prepared in two golden vats of oil: Whiting, some sort of odd cheese thing that didn’t quite work, and a spanner crab mousse in zucchini flowers topped with a delicate fold of iberico.

Wonderful.

But then … more fried courses.

Haco does it best when it tempers its tempura. Picture: Supplied

Respite came in the form of “snapper rice”: Perfect fish on Japanese koshihikari rice, topped with salmon eggs and a glorious shaving of truffle because, well, why not?

A great concept with many fantastic individual bits, we wonder if there is a reason why no one has tried to fill Haco’s point of difference – the tempura degustation – before.

We get that the team wants to open our eyes to what proper tempura should be (light and fresh, not gloppy and battery), but perhaps the point is made a little too much.

While lacking the theatre, the meal risked falling into a middle ground between high end sushi and suburban strip mall teriyaki.

Because in swerving from a series of delicate, intricate, and really first-class courses to fried plate after fried, the whole experience was a bit like a certain 1960s New Zealand test cricketer – which is to say, not quite one thing nor the other.

— The Mouth is an anonymous critic and bon vivant who pays his own way around Sydney and beyond.