While the menu includes wagyu, snow crab and other luxury items, it’s the humbler dishes that leave the biggest impression.
15/20
Japanese$$
Every pocket of Tokyo has its claims to fame.
Shibuya has the scramble crossing. Shinjuku houses the planet’s busiest train station. Harajuku is legendary for out-there fashion. Ginza, meanwhile, epitomises Japanese worldliness and luxury.
Translating to “silver mint” in Japanese, Ginza is synonymous with the finer things in life. The precinct is home to four Tiffany’s boutiques; flagship Japanese department stores boasting more storeys than most Perth hotels; plus 29 Michelin-starred restaurants, including two of the capital’s fabled three-starred dining rooms.
In short, if you harboured aspirations to open an ambitious Japanese eatery, Ginza would be a suitably fancy star to hitch one’s wagon to, even if the said eatery is found halfway down a dark alley.
Welcome to Ginza Midai, one of the five venues inside the Japanese food Disneyland, Ginza Nana Alley. Pulling back the restaurant’s mustard noren curtain reveals a sparse, tightly packed room built around a blonde timber counter with a dozen seats ringing an open kitchen. (And I do mean tightly packed. Getting in and out of your chair requires similar levels of neighbourly co-operation as going to the toilet on a plane.) But just as it is in-flight, the wisest play is to stay seated and try holding it in: you won’t want to miss a moment of chef Midai Hatakeyama’s nightly performances.
Both Hatekeyama and Ginza Midai are about kappo cuisine: a school of Japanese cookery where items are prepared to order and served in a cosy, intimate setting for maximum theatre, interactivity and – most pleasingly in a time where pre-prepared, room-temperature food is gaining in popularity – flavour. At one end of the kitchen is a gas stove crowded with pots, pans and a konro grill fuelled by Japanese binchotan charcoal. At the other is baby-faced Hatekayama, his slender yanagiba knife in hand, carefully slicing and preparing dishes for guests.
Dishes such as the minor miracle that is Kyoto-style freshwater eel: a seasonal wonder in which the creature’s luscious flesh is “minced” via intricate knifework, then patiently grilled till it blooms like a flower. Fresh eel is rare in these parts – most eel served at Perth Japanese restaurants is frozen – and the unexpected offer of an add-it-yourself shaker of black chilli powder fizzing with sancho pepper underscores that buzz of discovery.
Unsurprisingly, seafood features prominently with the restaurant serving both Japanese and Australian fish. Of course, there’s sashimi and sushi, although the former only comes as a five-fish platter that might include fat, rosy hunks of tuna and squares of squid, quickly scored for tenderness and quickly charred. The solitary sushi option features fatty Japanese black bonito pressed atop vinegared rice and served with strips of nori for diners to assemble their own onigiri.
Meticulously handled seafood, naturally, comes at a cost: sashimi will set you back $88 while the sushi is $56 for two pieces. The price tags attached to the snow crab, wagyu and other high-end proteins may also stop diners in their tracks, although it’s worth noting that dishes are designed to be shared between two.
But while luxury ingredients chime with the special occasion aspirations of the restaurant, it’s the kitchen’s work with humbler foodstuffs that denotes Ginza Midai as an operation of real substance.
The way that sweet, simmered conger eel celebrates the airiness of whipped potato and smoked daikon salad. Or the haunting, oceanic funk of chewy buckwheat noodles blanketed by an orange snowdrift of finely grated karasumi: salted mullet roe and Japan’s answer to Italy’s bottarga. Slow-cooking beef tendon in stock, sake and soy sauce renders the bovine offcut into an unctuous joy made even more memorable by its accompanying bowl of glossy potato loosened with butter and dashi: a starchy delight that’s half mash, half puree.
But perhaps the most compelling of Midai-san’s rags-to-riches cooking is his oden: a Japanese hotpot starring ingredients slowly simmered in broth. In Japan, our man spent years at a specialist oden restaurant specialising in Kyoto-style oden: a lighter soup base than the darker, soy-heavy version served at Tokyo oden restaurants and konbini stores.
It’s this savoury fish and chicken broth that underpins Ginza Midai’s choose-your-own oden adventure where guests can revel in soft-yolked eggs, crumbly chicken meatballs and chubby chunks of daikon cooked till just-so, lolling in said soup. When was the last time a radish rocked your food universe?
Among the minor criticisms I noted about dinner at Ginza Midai – I’d love to see the uneven, albeit well-intentioned service sharpened – my main gripe was with the dining format. In Perth, it’s almost expected that a setting like this would offer omakase or set menu dining, especially considering the breadth of the menu. While Yuso Hirose – Ginza Nana Alley’s operations manager – says that management may consider set menus in future, they’re sticking to their guns for now.
“We know that doing a la carte is harder and it’d be easier for preparation and waste if we did omakase,” says Hirose. “But we want people to be able to choose what they want to eat and drink and maybe check out some of the other venues while they’re here. As long as they’re happy with that, then we’re happy to keep doing it this way.”
In an era where some restaurants ask diners to fit into their machine, this sentiment is a reminder that giving guests the luxury of choice remains a vital part of hospitality.
The low-down
Vibe: an intimate, 12-seat restaurant adding quiet sophistication to Perth’s Japanese food scene.
Go-to dish: oden hotpot, grilled eel with sansho sauce.
Drinks: a terrific array of sake and sake tasting flights, plus a tight edit of wines designed to complement the cooking.
Cost: Cost: about $150 for two, excluding drinks (and big-ticket dishes).
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Max Veenhuyzen is a journalist and photographer who has been writing about food, drink and travel for national and international publications for more than 20 years. He reviews restaurants for the Good Food Guide.
