Restaurant review: Shobosho, Adelaide

Adelaide’s compact dining preceinct has a hip new attraction: a funky Japanese-Korean bar-restaurant.

Mod Asian: the Japanese/Korean cuisine is intriguing but a work in progress. Picture: Sam Roberts

A mate calls it Adelaide’s Bermuda Triangle. A compact pleasure zone to the north of the CBD centring on Peel and Leigh Streets where afternoons and nights routinely disappear. Over the past five years, a renaissance of bars, cafes and restaurants has warmed these laneways like a wood-burning grill. Coffee and croissants at Coffee Branch; long lunch at Peel Street; pre-dinner drinks at Clever Little Tailor, one of Australia’s most wonderful bars; dinner at Pink Moon Saloon or Bread & Bone. Follow that up with a cleanser at Udaberri, or return to CLT for a cocktail and a late night Barry White singalong. All without registering more than 300 metres on your FitBit.

Into this hedonistic mix let’s throw Shobosho, another place that blurs the line between eating and drinking, restaurant and bar. You could dine in a traditional sense here; eat communally immersed in the tongue-in-cheek old-school Japanese restaurant aesthetic of wall-to-wall blond pine; or merely snack over a procession of boldly flavoured mod Asian morsels such as chicken heart yakitori or pot stickers with funky wines, cocktails and sake. I doubt they’ll be judgmental about how you consume.

Shobosho restaurant, Adelaide.

Being a small city, the same names keep bobbing to the surface of the local restaurant pond. One of them is Simon Kardachi, who owns or co-owns a swag of interesting Adelaide restaurants including Osteria Oggi and Press; another is Studio Gram, whose design interpretations increasingly dot the SA food landscape. Shobosho is yet another joint project.

Returning from Melbourne to head up this Japanese/Korean/Australian “grill” is chef Adam Liston, who started his career at one on Kardachi’s oldest restaurants, The Melting Pot. This is something very different.

Shobosho’s is a bold style of food that, like the hip hop soundtrack, will quite possibly polarise. Liston’s muse is Japan and, to a lesser extent, Korea, and he applies the flavours and seasonings of those cuisines to an archly modern, iconoclastic style of informal food. It comes from an open kitchen with a long eating bar where serious young folk shout “aye” as a new order is called. They have a custom-built cooking line to play with: wood oven, hydraulic grill, rotisserie and yakitori pit.

Diced yellowfin tuna with chargrilled fresh soy beans, bonito cream, crisp black rice and seaweed. Picture: Sam Roberts

The menu is particularly flexible. While I’d label most of it “intriguing”, only one dish truly thrilled: a combo of diced yellowfin tuna with chargrilled fresh soy beans, bonito cream, crisp black rice and other seaweedy stuff (pictured). It is utterly brilliant. Prawn toast with chivey mayo and slices of barbecued Wagyu on top with sweet and sour sauce, however, just confused me.

A whole leek, roasted black in the coals and served with smoked milk and herb oil, and more leek ash, is an interesting diversion. A bowl of udon noodles with shiitake butter, salty dashi and a variety of fresh and semi-dried mushrooms is something I’d avoid repeating. So rich. So one-dimensional.

The claws-and-all rotisserie teriyaki chicken – jointed, plumped on a bed of smoked miso and eggplant puree with a generous moat of sauce – is a lot easier to understand. It comes with wood oven-baked shallot bread. It’s the biz.

I’m not so sure about Shobosho as a whole. Yes, the place has energy, good staff and funky drinks. But the flavours and textures of our small sample? A work in progress, I reckon.

Shobosho
Address: 17 Leigh St, Adelaide | Contact: [phone] shobosho.com.au | Hours: lunch, dinner Tue-Sun | Typical prices: starters $17; mains $35; dessert $14 | Like this? Try… Supernormal, Melbourne | Summary: Not for everyone | Score: 3 out of 5