Reviewing is a difficult art. There are certain constrained forms I particularly like. The obituary. The chess column. The restaurant review. All so constrained by the necessaries, requiring clever use of what little room there is for the decorations. The English tend to do them best. Zia Mahmoud does the most with the least with The Guardian’s bridge column. Haiku fascinates me. The very word puts me on edge. I hate haiku about as much as shakuhachi music, but at the same time I love it about as much as a good egg breakfast, a short speech, photos of Japanese taking photos of cherry blossoms with unbelievably expensive cameras (snap thanks to a great photographer, Mark Alberding), and the way sacred cows get in the way of traffic in New Delhi. Short is good. Less is more. Small is beautiful. Metre is a useful discipline for the poet’s natural tendency to ungrammatical excess. Some of the most elegant writing going around today is to be found on this website. I particularly like:

After enough beers
My intelligence dazzles.
Others are jealous.

and

ugly red flowers
bloom on the floor of the bar
after the big brawl

and

Bagged a centerfold
But awakened to road kill
Damn you, beer goggles

All of which is an ironically long introduction to Jamie Wodetzki’s Breakfast Blog. He has concision down pat, and does well with the form of the restaurant review. Since first reading his blog, I was sure he was a lawyer. Many lawyers can’t write, but some can, and his writing had the ring of a lawyer who could write. A moment’s google searching confirmed my suspicions. See Jamie’s review of Cavallero here, Birdman Eating’s here, Cafe Rosamond’s here, Richmond’s New York Tomato Cafe’s here.

John Lethlean does well too. I think it would take some self-confidence for the town’s leading food critic to give Lentil as Anything a glowing thumbs up, but that’s what he did.

The Age’s John Lethlean gave Lentil as Anything the thumbs up the other day. Now that same journal’s Michael Herden has given Cavallero on Smith St a decent plug. I’m dying to try the place: the assiduous Breakfast Blogger got there almost a month ago, and he’s got the whole of Melbourne to cover. He wasn’t totally convinced, but I’m calling it teething problems: I want to like the place. Mr Herdern calls Smith St a “psychotically eclectic strip”. Too many interior decor shops already I reckon, but there’s room for a few more Cavalleros (snap). According to the folk who supply their coffee, the Cavalleros have “a shiny new chrome 85 series two group”. That’s a cofee machine.

On Monday I was frustrated again when I headed down to Babka for lunch. It was closed too.  Still hungry, I was diverted by Grub St Bookstore, where the genial bookseller looked very pleased when I asked him if he had any books on the history of Collingwood. He went out the back and returned with Growing Up in Collingwood, an A4 paperback self-published by John Ventura last year. It looks like a bloody brilliant social history. It is so unedited, so full of graphic design faux-pas, that it positively vomits authenticity. It has many photos, and the most classic hand-drawn diagrams of the author’s favourite childhood haunts, his family’s residence above the family fishmonger at 262 Jhonston St, and the like.

Ventura was schooled at St Euphrasia in the Abbotsford Convent:

“Sometimes we ordered our lunch via a brown paper bag with lunch money enclosed and our order and name written on teh bag. These were sent to the milk bar around the corner opposite the Yarra Falls knitting mill. At 12 o’clock, the bell would ring and we would all stand up to say the Angelus prayer. After dismissal, we all raced down to the milk bar to collect our lunch.”

He used to go to the first Coles Store, and to Foy & Gibson’s on Smith St:

“G.J. Coles’ first variety store opened in 1914 and in 1919 they advertised nothing over 2/6. I remember the glass tops over the goods displayed, probably stop us kids pinching things. Mum bought my stationery here and I also scored a metal frog that made a clicking noise. Remember those?

I think next door to Coles was the large retailer ‘Foy & Gibson’s’ a quality trader who begain in 1891. They made goods in a factory and mill complex between Wellington and Smit Streets. They had a variety of goods, Manchester, clothing, furniture, leather goods, soft furnishings, hardware, books, toys and sweets.

It was just magic for a 6-year-old to wander through the store. I well remember the systems of overhead cables in Foy and Gibson’s when you bought something, the sales assistant would place the money and docket into a brass container. This was then fitted into a bracket hanging from the cable. A quick flick and the container was propelled along the carrier to the upstairs office where the money was removed, checked, and the change and receipt returned by the same process. Meanwhile your purchase was wrapped neatly with string and your change refunded.”

I had dinner at Wabi Sabi, a cute little cafe restaurant near the corner of Smith and Gertrude Sts, and therefore in the immediate vicinity of many good things including Dr Follicles, Books for Cooks, Yelza, Dr Java, Enoteca, and Ladro. I had admired it many times, walking by, but never been in, except once, for takeaway. It is a lovely busy tiny little place crammed together in what I expect is a most authentic Tokyoey way. Sophia Davis (pictured) and Tomoya Kawasaki seem to be the proprieters. Sophia’s front of house not-very-Japanesishness is one of the things that first lets you know this is not your average Japanese restaurant. The whole place has a kind of Friends of the Earth meets the Napier Hotel meets whatever the equivalent of Chinoiserie is meets Toyko zen; lots of things are put together creatively and exquisitely, slightly tongue in cheek kitsch cheek by chic jowl. It gets the inaugural “Good as Hell” award, henceforth a searchable category. See flickr for more photos, especially of the charming interior decor of the outside dunny.

Wabi sabi is said to be the essence of Japanese aesthetics, the attraction of impermanent beauty, of beautiful imperfection, showing an interesting link to the first noble truth of Buddhism, including, it seems, Japanese zen Buddhism. Traditional zen gardens, which is a feature of the rear courtyard where we ate are very wabi sabi it seems, and though it may have been an ignorant latching onto of things not understood, I thought our sake bottle to be quite wabi sabi, the glaze draped rather than painted carefully, the form affected by indentations in its bulb.

Japanese restaurants are often beautiful but terribly all-the-same, as if Japan has an unyielding static culture. Conformity is still pretty important in Nippon, but anyone who has travelled and met the oddball Japanese on the road knows that it is not all the same: in Mali I kept hearing stories of a Japanese girl with no English, no French, and no Arabic who had successfully travelled from Morocco through Western Sahara and Mauritania to Senegal, then probably one of the most impossible journeys in the world. And in Kathmandu I met a Japanese man who had ridden a pony named “Princess” from Lhasa to Kathmandu, sleeping in a tent, again, an episode of unfathomable worldly ridiculousness. He had hundreds of photos of the high Himalayas and the sweeping Tibetan plateau, each with a pair of donkey’s ears protruding from the bottom margin. And then there was Kanae Kubota who hitch-hiked with me and a German (we did not discuss the war) in the backs of rusty Thai utes without a care, but not before she had used her travel iron each morning to make presentable her white white t-shirt. This restaurant is more like these guys than Tokyo’s Royal Palace, and that is fitting, since it serves home style Japanese fare different from the standard Japanese restaurant menu.

We ate tofu dango, which Miss K enjoyed for its subtle flavours and I thought was good but not the best choice ($16.80), broccoli with sour plum sauce, a most unusual dish of cold al dente broccoli florettes with, yep, a crimson plum sauce ($5.80). They’re not joking about it being sour. I quite liked it but it would surely not be everyone’s cup of tea. We had octopus balls (takoyaki: fried perfectly formed spheres with slightly crusty surfaces, a creamy consistency with little bits of chewy octopus inside, served with Japanese mayonnaise and fish flakes which writhed in the heat, $7.50), a jug of chilled house sake ($9.50), green tea ice cream (an experience which tastes just like it sounds, bitter and sweet at the same time, $6) and a red bean paste rice cake (mochi) (another experience: the chewy rice cake was bright green and stuffed with the red beans: $2.50). In short, the food is unusual to most people’s tastes, and good. We have previously had a glorious butterfish dish swimming around in a brown soup, and lightly seared salmon sushi which might well represent a bit of east west fusion. All I can say is there should be more lightly seared sushi.

It’s also a place to sit out the front on tiny stools and have a beer, or just to pop in for a quick weekday lunch: they do $9.90 bento boxes, Tuesday to Friday between 12 and 3. They’re at no. 94 Smith St, ph 9417 6119, email wabisabisalon@yahoo.com.au. And there seem to be shiatsu practitioners associated with the restaurant. I reckon it pays to book early because some of the tables are definitely better than others, and for a Sunday night, the bookings were pretty tight.