This is Cocoro Japanese Pottery Cafe in Smith St, which has been open for a year. One of our friends married a wonderful Japanese woman. Months ago, we cooked a dried apricot tart for them (with a bit of help in the form of pastry purchased from the Richmond Hill Cafe & Larder) and they brought around all the requisites for green tea. As far as I knew, the watery stuff my sushi bar lunch haunt provides me with was green tea, and the green tea ceremony was something in which everyone moved agonisingly slowly. Only when I saw the splendid paraphenalia — in particular the chasen, the bamboo whisk — and the luminously green frothy tea, did I begin to understand how a ceremony might be crafted around this drink. I had never seen anything like it, and never tasted anything like it. Here is a photo:

(I also learnt that people don’t move agonisingly slowly in the green tea ceremony.)

On Saturday night, we had a meal on Victoria St, but it was too noisy for conversation, so we headed to Cocoro for dessert. It is a very lovely place. We sat in a little lounge area newly installed in the front window where you can also nurse a tea or coffee and read the paper. I had my second black sesame icecream for the weekend there — the first was a gustational revelation at Charmaine’s on Brunswick St which I can’t recommend too highly. This one was formed into two balls — “buns” in the language of the menu writer — stuffed with red bean “jam”. It was good, and most of the desserts, many of which featured green tea (“macha”), were equally good. There are safer options for those less culinary adventurous. It seems to be another Austrapanese couple-run place. It’s a tiny place. There are only a few tables. It is a great place to go for conversation.

Like Wabi Sabi Salon across the road, the traditional Japstralian menu is eschewed in favour of less familiar and frankly more interesting home-style Japanese cooking. But this is a serious place. Their website indicates that they are seeking to set up a farm so as to source their own organic vegetables. And they do real frothy bitter luminously green tea, served with the traditional flourish of ritually turning the cup until its “front” is facing the guest. Though I didn’t verify this fact, our friends suggested that based on their previous experiences of this place, they expected that the tea would have been fresh, as in recently flown in from Japan. It turns out that Cocoro are actually starting up an organic green tea wholesaling business. Our tea was from Kyoto, source of the very best green tea according to Wikipedia.

I can feel myself heading towards grumpy old mandom when I think about the price of coffee in Melbourne. $3 is usually too much for a cup of the stuff, but here, a big dose of good coffee, served in their beautiful pottery handle-less cups, is bearable. The Age’s Epicure’s take on the place is here. Thanks for the first photo go to an Irishman, Jeremy Keith.

Miss K, renascent party girl, took me on a bar crawl of Gertrude St on Friday. We checked out Little Rebel (don’t share my barber man’s enthusiasm), Radio, and Gertrude’s (more anon). It involved dinner at Ume Nomiya (ume: Japanese plum, usually pickled — pictured, thanks to Matt Helminski; nomiya: drinking house) the tiny 37-seat Japanese place next to our regular haunt, Tandoori Times. Indolent Andy said it was his favourite Japanese restaurant, and that was enough to pull me out of some inertia and get in there. Mind you I think lingering first impressions when the place was but a bar and was not all that busy were preying on my inertia. Then, it was a bit too cool for school, weird even, though that was back in 2001. We loved every minute of our relatively quick dinner and warm sake slurp there.

Miss K, who uttered the heresy “I like this more than Wabi Sabi Salon”, had a stir fry on luscious Japanese white rice ($14.50). Apart from the very well executed tempura vegetable parcels, it was just a stir fry, but it was how stir fries — surely the most frequently badly cooked dish — should be. My small meal of kangaroo tataki ($11.50) was a work of art: rare kangaroo medallions with tiny cubes of dark purple jelly (ponzu jelly?) and wasabi mayonnaise. It was one of the best plates I have devoured in a long time.

Like Wabi Sabi Salon, it’s got decidedly un-Japanese front of house staff and a strongly caucasion crowd, with quirky Japanese chefs out the back pushing the boundaries of Melbourne’s understanding of Japanese food. They maintain a bottle keep system a la Japonnaise where you can buy a bottle of whisky or sake and have it kept aside for when you come in.
The proprietress is Fiona Craig, a kiwi with an arts degree majoring in sociology who fell in love with Japan while teaching English there for 3 years or so in the mid-90s.

The details are:

197 Gertrude St, Fitzroy — 9415 6101 — food 6-10 p.m. except Sunday and Monday

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.