Dan Stock: Good booze can’t make up for bad food at Azabu Juban

GOOD booze can’t make up for bad food at this Japanese bar/restaurant in Yarraville, writes Dan Stock.

Azabu Juban in Yarraville. Picture: Andrew Tauber

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I’M sitting at a kerbside table on one of the late-light balmy nights we’ve been blessed with of late, the astro-turfed square in front of me a cacophony of delighted squeals and tag-chasey, while the tensed weekday shoulders of their half-watching parents gradually loosen as a bottle of white empties.

It’s Friday night in Yarraville, and the once-pop-up park outside the Sun Theatre, now a permanent attraction for the young families who call this patch of Pleasantville home, is obviously the place to be.

I’m drinking a Bechervoka and tonic – a rarely seen here Czech herbal drink that tastes like walking through a pine forest while eating plum pudding – from one of the café/bars that line the strip, thinking this is what village life is all about.

It’s a restorative end to an evening that started equally charming, getting off the 6.10 from Flinders St I was greeted by a dappled-lit scene of wagging tails, Baby Bjorns and the shared smiling promise of the weekend ahead. If only bookends told the story.

Taste restaurant review: Azabu Juban in Yarraville . Picture Andrew Tauber

I was alerted to Azabu Juban by the many inbox newsletters that breathlessly announce the latest openings of those venues with a cool look or PR budget to get them noticed, this one given MUST VISIT status. Unfortunately – and this is the problem with so much that gets published online – it didn’t appear that they had.

Because while there’s much on paper to get excited about here – an impressive range of Japanese whisky, a line in sake and home-style cooking in a space named after a cobblestoned Tokyo suburb – there’s little about its execution I can recommend.

It’s a lovely space, where a resplendent peacock stands sentry atop the bar over a room of dark timber, tan leather, bentwood seats and greenery, though these first impressions are quickly tempered by a dismissive greeting and a number of reserved signs on tables in the mostly empty room – though not on the table of two three of us were crammed onto, even though we had.

While I don’t understand using “reserved” signs – it’s like a string wrapped around the finger of the restaurant that learning table numbers should solve – it also heralds a lack of attention and care that defined the next 90 minutes.

This is the second venue for husband and wife Adam Sleight and Maya Fujihara who also have 5 ½ year-old Ajitoya in Seddon, so the amateurish nature of their few-month-new venture is surprising.

Two tries from the sake list before we found one in stock (it’s called a printer) that was then unceremoniously dumped on the table raised eyebrows, but not as high as when the kaisen salad was served, for this tumble of chunky sashimi cuts – salmon, tuna and kingfish on the very fishy side of fish – tasted less of the pristine seas and more like hope for the best ($18). Not a promising start.

The kasien salad at Azabu Juban. Picture: Andrew Tauber

Five steamed gyoza were better – the wrappers delicate, the pork filling flavoursome – but expensive at $14, while “karaage is leeking” was an unpunny miss, the little nuggets of light-fried chicken forgettable, the “spiced leek chilli sauce” missing bar some julienned leeks atop ($14).

An ungenerous plate of spongy, chewy octopus that tasted of burnt grill was served with lurid green pureed edamame cream as appetising as the end of a smoker’s cough and at $26, as painful as one, too.

Swordfish at Tazabu Juban in Yarraville. Picture: Andrew Tauber

The pick of the night – the gyudon – has apparently since come off the menu, so you’ll miss its sweet-simmered dashi beef on rice with a slow-cooked egg ($20), though why the “grilled vegetables” plate remains on it is a mystery solved only by assuming a vendetta against not only vegetarians, but vegetables.

The only thing more astonishing than being served a wooden board consisting of just three limp asparagus stalks, three zucchini rounds, an almost raw brussels sprout cut in half, three withered carrots, and some capsicum and radish, all char marked with a miso mayo alongside, is being charged $24 for it. I’d prefer scurvy.

At least the Japanese beers on tap – rotating through the brewers, there was Kirin and a Suntory pilsner this night – are cold, and the almost 30 whiskies have been collected with care and afford excellent sipping.

But good booze can’t make up for bad food.

You can go and follow the latest thing by reading the releases but this canary went down the mine and came up hawking dust.

Me? I’ll be at the square drinking Bechervoka instead.