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Poketto, the third Japanese-inspired cafe-restaurant by Eugene Leung and Dika Prianata, known for Kurumac in Marrickville and Cool Mac in Kirribilli, is a place for all.

Today, two people at the big round Parker dining table near the kitchen have set up a soft floor mat and toys for two babies to play on. The tiny customers wobble with fists of sushi rice shared from their carers’ onigiri sets.

Across the room, people in manga T-shirts, woollen beanies and sparkly patent sneakers as wide as dinner plates curve spoons through silky soybean panna cotta beside earnest types in skin-tight suits whipping in fish toast on thick white milk bread.

In the midst of Chippendale, in a site passed on by previous tenants Sample Coffee Roasters who ran Old Gold Cafe here, Poketto hums with good food and happy locals.

“It was too good an opportunity to pass on,” Leung says of taking over the site. “And it came with a liquor licence so we’re going to try and make the most of it.”

Poketto’s menu is created with Leung and Prianata’s longtime collaborator Junichi Okamatsu, the executive chef who is working in the kitchen with Jack Mosher, a Young Chef of the Year finalist who worked at hatted venues Poly in Surry Hills, Ante in Newtown and the now-closed Automata in Chippendale.

Fans of their work will recognise the clever, beautiful and filling options at Poketto, where the unifying memory is dishes combining delicate aesthetics with what is often branded comfort food.

There are eight savoury dishes including shokupan toast, thick white mouth-melty milk bread with soy bonito butter and the option of onsen eggs; a mentaiko melt with cod roe, cheese and shokupan; kakuni soba noodles with pork belly and clear broth and keema curry with minced chicken.

The mentaiko udon, a luscious swirl of creamy noodles, is topped with evenly placed hillocks of bright orange cod roe and shimeji mushrooms below a top-knot of fresh microgreens.

The fish toast, a new dish devised for Poketto and served on shokupan with salmon, kingfish and tuna, is a majestically rich, chunky and citrusy tongue-zing of a thing.

“Jack is bringing different cooking methods and the fish toast is actually a confit fish,” Leung says. “We use the fish scraps that we don’t use for the sashimi.

“Sometimes I’m not sure if it’s a good thing to tell people that we’re putting fish scraps on toast but, in some ways, it’s good because we’re not wasting things.”

The most expensive dish on the menu, kaisen don with mixed sashimi and hunks of pickled ginger on sushi rice, with broth ($34), might seem steep for lunch. But, this is no wafer-thin fish veneers hiding a vast plain of rice arrangement.

Decorated with two nasturtium leaves, as if delicate green parasols had been hoisted by fairies, the dish shows Okamatsu and Mosher going to town with slabs of salmon, kingfish and tuna, edged by pickled ginger hunks, tiny chopped shallots and a mini avalanche of cod roe. It is fresh, generous and magnificent stuff.

Equally magnificent is the kinako, roasted soybean panna cotta served in a dark red sweet sauce, and a lush and earthy delight.

Along with a good range of coffee, teas, and Japanese sodas, Poketto’s menu features beer and two cocktails.

The latter combine umeshu, ryoku and mint, and matcha, tonic and limoncello respectively, and are perfect for savouring sips as the northern sunlight moves further and further up the cafe’s front steps and inside.

Leung says there are plans to use the outdoor space – a street area out front bracketed by council-approved mural-covered concrete bollards – for events.

“I’ve got some friends in the music and arts industry and we’d like to do launches or something like that,” he says. “Not rowdy, pissoff-your-neighbours type things.

“Just to have a drink on the street and back the nightlife a little.

“This the closest to the city that I’ve ever opened up a business. It’s all still new and I’m still trying to work out who our customers are and where they’re coming from.

“But it’s a beautiful space to be.”