Ishizuka offers Japanese kaiseki cuisine in heart of Melbourne CBD

HIDDEN in a secret alley at the heart of Melbourne lies a subtle slice of Japan that is simply exquisite — and one dish especially provided close-your-eyes bliss, writes Dan Stock.

THERE’S baby abalone, served in its shell, poached, seared and exquisitely tender, its subtle meatiness enhanced by a sauce of its seared liver.

There’s a square of anago — just-warm sushi rice on which sticky glazed eel rests — alongside a skewer of set pumpkin custard and a pine needle threaded with tiny radish rectangles.

A petite orb of persimmon jelly is filled with cream cheese, while a small pickled Japanese turnip provides a puckeringly sharp counter.

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These “autumn delicacies” make up the zensai (“small pretty things”) course, one of 12 that are served over the course of two hours in this subterranean temple of Japanese haute cuisine.

This is kaiseki, Japan’s answer to France’s temples of gastronomy, which is no less exalted, its practitioners no less revered, that the French masters from Escoffier down.

Melbourne was introduced to kaiseki last year when The Table at Kuro Kisume opened.

Delivering 12 diners a night dinner and a one-man show, with the chef bubbling bonito broth through a coffee siphon, and dispatching crayfish to create tail tempura and anointing dishes with gold leaf and caviar like a benevolent billionaire, it’s a dance in Japan’s Imperial Court with a few Melbourne Shuffle moves.

Here, it’s Tomotaka Ishizuka transforming his decades’ experience — from Kyoto kaiseki to most recently chef de cuisine at Crown’s Koko — into this eponymous foray into the rarefied world of a cuisine and its ceremony formalised over centuries.

While I’ve never been to Japan, or even seen Lost in Translation, Ishizuka is the most Japanese Japanese restaurant I’m likely to ever eat in — in Melbourne, at least.

You enter the restaurant down an alley off Bourke St you’d never notice if you weren’t looking for the keypad on which you need to buzz to gain entry to the lift that will take you to the basement. So far, so very Tokyo.

A yakimono dish at Ishizuka. Picture: Eve Wilson

Inside, a hushed welcome, textured concrete walls and an extraordinary floor-to-ceiling lantern that demarcates the space from the entrance to the stage set for just 16, where Tomotaka and his chefs are tending the robarta grill and sharpening blades ready for their close up.

To start, we sip deliciously spicy sweet ginger tea from a tiny bowl; to end, there’s a palate cleansing searingly bitter matcha broth nodding to the tea ceremony that is as much a part of kaiseki in Kyoto as the procession of artful ceramics on which precise, sculptural compositions of textures and flavours are placed.

In between there are moments of simple, sublime happiness.

Such as snow crab claw meat in a delicate bonito broth that’s draped with a gossamer radish slice, a tiny piece of pickled mandarin adding a sliver of brightness.

Or slices of just-seared full-blood wagyu so decadently creamy they could be dessert, or torched scampi and a clam called geoduck with vinegar-sharp celery and a yuzu-spritzed “meringue” cloud that disappears like a dream.

A delicate sunomono dish at Ishizuka.

A plate of autumn fruit highlights the understated perfection of the nashi pear’s crunch, the blueberry’s tartness, the persimmon’s sweet sharpness.

Add a single raspberry piped with yuzu custard, a glorious Japanese green peach and toffee-drizzled sweet potato and a brilliant bridge between savoury and sweet courses is built.

Or, indeed, a single piece of the palest pink otoro sushi, that most prized belly piece from that most prized blue fin tuna that’s a couple of bites of close-your-eyes bliss at once ethereal and everlasting.

There’s sweet and sticky saikyo miso-glazed black cod and fat Hokkaido scallops served in a scooped out persimmon that’s as all-encompassing and unforgettable as a first love, and even a dessert of chestnuts in espresso cream that’s so balanced and poised it could dance on a theatre stage.

David Lawler (Rockpool, Spice Temple) devised the haiku-short wine list that’s as equally considered and precise.

Weighted towards rieslings with residual sugar and refined acids, and bright and juicy light reds, it’s thoughtfully priced with excellent drinking whether you spend $10 a glass or $650 a bottle.

Ishizuka is an experience rarefied, refined, exacting and contemplative, though I wouldn’t call it fun. It’s exquisite.

And exquisitely expensive. I very much enjoyed it, but for the amount of money — it’s $220 a head, plus drinks — I’ll more quickly return to a restaurant that’s part of the creation of our own cuisine’s culture, rather than one devoted to an imported set of rules and ancient dining mores.

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And, while I think everyone should, at least once, get to try a piece of otoro, eating Peruvian tuna flown in from the Tokyo fish market in a basement in Melbourne, however sublime, feels somewhat “let them eat cake”.

That said, I do love that Ishizuka is in our city, offering an experience that’s completely unique. In Melbourne, at least.

ISHIZUKA

Basement, B01/139 Bourke St, city

Ph: 8594 0895

ishizuka.com.au

Open: Tues-Sat 6pm/8.30pm

Go-to dish: Zensai autumn delicacies

Score: 16/20