Ah-ummm? Ah-ooom? Ah-woooom? Aooooooooooom?

When jazz composer Charles Mingus released Ah Um in 1959, listeners weren’t quite sure how to pronounce the ground-breaking album’s name. Many still aren’t.

The avant-garde Mingus, of course, wasn’t in the business of telling people how to respond to his art – let alone how to pronounce something – preferring to let end-users come to their own conclusions. Which kind of makes Ah Um a perfect name for the Astral Weeks’ team’s new, difficult-to-pigeonhole restaurant that opened on Friday.

Because while chef Branden Scott’s bowerbird menus might feature farmhouse-style dishes such as gem lettuce teamed with the Basque sheep’s milk cheese Ossau-Iraty, or anchovies dressed with olive oil – you know, plates you might have expected to eat during Scott’s Wines of While era – Ah Um isn’t a European restaurant or a wine bar. (Having said that, the wine list that South Australian winemaker Jean-Baptiste Courdesses has written for the bar wouldn’t look out of place at either of those establishments.)

Scallop crudo with the Peruvian dressing leche de tigre (“tiger’s milk”) and good oysters sharpened with a puckering rhubarb mignonette speak to a love of seafood, but steak tartare with prawn crackers suggests the menu is as much turf as it is surf. And although there’s a bunch of interesting, small-scale sake imported by Blackmarket Sake – and the team behind Sydney’s brilliant Ante – Ah Um is in zero danger of being classed as a Japanese restaurant.

Rather, it’s a space that – like the mothership – offers its guests good sound (Translate Sound, the Sydney-based builders of Ah Um’s digital speaker system, flew to Perth to calibrate the sound system in situ); good drinks and good food, only this time the focus is on creating somewhere to sit down and dine rather than to grab a snack and be on your way.

“Astral Weeks has become a bit of a calming sanctuary in Northbridge,” said Sean O’Neill, one of the partners behind Ah Um and Astral Weeks.

“Ah Um is almost like a sanctuary within that sanctuary. When you leave the restaurant, you almost forget where you’ve been.”

While O’Neill and co stressed that Astral Weeks and Ah Um would be standalone prospects, the two venues remain connected, not least because you enter the latter through the former. (Indeed, guests that make a booking – and you should definitely book – check in with staff at Astral Weeks who will then bring them through.)

Ah Um has also been given the same acoustic treatment as the listening bar to ensure that each evening’s AWRadio playlist sounds top-notch.

Astral Weeks’ smiley bar manager Indira Edwards will also be helping out at Ah Um, although the person in charge of the show is restaurant manager Jae Woods, formerly of Beaufort Street double-act Le Rebelle and Bar Rogue.

A friendly, fashionable front-of-house presence striking out in her first venue manager role, Woods feels like an ideal ambassador for Ah Um’s urban and urbane style of hospitality.

Ah Um is at Shop 12/60-66 Roe Street, Northbridge (enter via Astral Weeks) and is open Wednesday to Saturday.