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