When Bar Besuto opens on Wednesday, July 26, owner-chef Joel Best will draw inspiration from the two-bite take on steak frites served at Singapore’s award-winning Burnt Ends restaurant, where Australian chef Dave Pynt serves wagyu steak tartare and caviar atop a cube of pommes Anna.

Best’s version will team caviar-topped steak tartare with miso potato.

But it’s what you drink with the dish that captures the spirit of Bar Besuto. The moody new Circular Quay venue is driven by Best’s obsession with Japanese whisky, and taps his private collection.

“It’s the biggest collection of Japanese-only whisky in a Sydney venue,” Best says while packing away hundreds of bottles. “A lot of it you can’t even find in Japan.”

As co-owner of omakase restaurant Besuto at the other end of Circular Quay, Best was able to fine-tune his whisky-food matching before opening Bar Besuto a few blocks away at Sydney Place.

“Matching whisky to food is the same process as sake or wine. For me, I will always try the whisky first then work through the flavour profile and what salt, acid or fat to match it to,” Best says.

The bar’s tight food menu includes crostini with wasabi cream, lightly smoked oysters and a whisky gelato. “It’s more of a snack menu, but you can have the toothfish [with pickled vegetables] and steak frites and make a meal out of it,” Best says.

There’s little doubt Australia is in the grip of a Japanese whisky boom. Nikki Knights, from importers Minleki Spirit Traders, says after several years of stable growth, imports of Japanese whisky spiked by 21 per cent in the last financial year.

Knights, known as the “Whisky Whisperer”, points to a posse of Sydney venues serious about Japanese whisky, including The Captain’s Balcony and restaurants Kuon and Sake. You can also drill down on Japanese whisky at the luxe Bancho Bar, in the back lanes of Chinatown.

“Our point of difference is we only serve Japanese whisky,” Best says. As the chef points to the rare Hanyu Game series and a 25-year-old Hakushu, he explains that frequent trips to Japan and tapping into the “whisky mafia” have enabled him to purchase small-run and difficult-to-find drops.

“One of the reasons they sell to me is I’m not buying to collect, sit on it and sell it at a higher price. The producers want people trying their whisky,” says Best, who prefers the Japanese spirit to those made in Scotland or Ireland.

So what’s the difference between them? Knights describes Japanese whisky as feminine and light, while Scotch “is more granular and masculine”.

“Japan has a gentle tone with its food and culture,” she says. “They don’t want whisky to overtake their food, they want to complement it.”

Further stoking interest in Japanese whisky will be Ennui, a restaurant and wine and whisky bar opening in Haymarket in November.

While Ennui’s whisky list will skirt Scotland, the United States and even Taiwan, half the list will be Japanese, says whisky specialist and collector Peter Chan, a partner in the venture.

“The most prized bottle from the [upcoming] list will be the Yamazaki 18-year Mizunara cask Suntory 100th Anniversary Edition,” Chan says.

Bar Besuto will open Tue-Sat 4pm-late from Wednesday, July 26.

3 Underwood Street, Circular Quay, besutosydney.com