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Can you imagine missing a food so much you open a restaurant that serves it? That’s what Akiko Asano did with Kare, which she launched a year ago. She pined for the Japanese curry she remembered from Tokyo and enjoyed in specialist curry shops, which she fell in love with during her primary school years, when it was a weekly fixture for lunch.

Kare isn’t just about solving a private anguish. Its mission is to showcase another
style of food in Melbourne, which too often stuffs Japanese cuisine into a sushi, sashimi, gyoza framework.

But what is Japanese curry, and how Japanese is it anyway? It’s one of the world’s
great culinary remixes, based on Indian curry spices, translated for the British navy, and then taken to Japan in the late 1800s.

It was then adopted, absorbed and adapted, most notably as a sweet, mild, thickened sauce poured over katsu (crumbed meat cutlets).

The concept has been re-exported to the UK, where you can get katsu-flavoured anything: chips, two-minute noodles, even tinned fish.

In Japanese homes and restaurants, curry is usually made from cubes: it’s a utilitarian mid-market staple. The versions here are more finessed, with nine different sauces made from scratch, each of them rested for three days to deepen the flavours. Caramelised onions are the base but other key ingredients are mushroom, tomato, wagyu fat and curry spices such as turmeric, coriander and pepper.

The finished curries are spooned over cutlets (including vegan versions), stirred through mince, mayo and soup and tumbled with meat that’s stuffed into orb-like bread puffs called pan.

The gentle delights of curry are augmented by fun and fresh dishes, including a tuna salad with okra and avocado, and a thrilling spin on miso eggplant with a bruleed crust.

Breakfast might mean a scrambled egg “croissando” with curried pork mince.

The shop motto is ‘made with warm’ and there is something very cosseted and cosy about the place.

Drinks are a huge focus: try anything matcha, or the sweet potato latte with soy caramel drizzle.

Kare means curry in Japanese but the fact the word is so close to “care” in English doesn’t feel accidental. The motto of the shop is “made with warm” and there is something very cosseted and cosy about the place, which is especially impressive as it’s on a windy corner opposite Queen Victoria Market.

Asano is an interior designer by trade, crafting restaurants including Tamura Sake Bar in Fitzroy. She sees parallels between design and dinner: both are about transforming materials to create satisfaction. Kare is doing its job very well.

Akiko Asano has her soul food, and the city has a new type of Japanese cafe, one that combines elements of a kare shop with a kissaten (Japanese coffee house), and is a part of Melbourne’s mish-mash food culture, too.