Koichi Minamishima’s eponymous sushi joint in Richmond is the millionaire’s roe

Koichi Minamishima’s eponymous restaurant has a beguiling air of mystery about it, tucked away as it is down a small side street in Richmond, about 5km from Melbourne’s CBD.

Koichi Minamishima wants customers to return not only as customers, but also as friends. Source: News Corp Australia

Luckily I have the address with me, because it’s easy to miss the entrance on a gloomy late-autumn Melbourne evening.

Pushing open the doors, I step inside an authentic high-end Japanese sushi restaurant — one of surprisingly few of its kind in Australia.

Running counter to the trend in Australia for more casual restaurants offering yakitori, ramen and other Japanese street-food staples, Minami­shima is purely focused on high quality omakase (chef’s choice) sushi.

“After working in Australia for many years, I have seen many modern Japanese restaurants open, but very few traditional ones,’’ says head chef and owner Minamishima-san. “So I wanted to bring a small piece of Japan to Australia and give my customers an authentic sushi omakase experience that they won’t be able to have in many other places.”

From behind the 10m European oak counter, where he’s working deftly with a knife, the wiry 45-year-old chef tells me he deliberately chose a “hidden place” in which to realise his culinary dream.

A native of Nagoya and a sushi chef at ­Melbourne’s Kenzan for 15 years, Minamishima-san has been doing this long enough to work and talk at the same time. He tells me how opening on his own has been his dream throughout his 25 years in the industry.

Minamishima, which also employs the talents of Hajime Horiguchi, formerly head chef at Wasabi in Noosa, opened late last year with little fanfare or publicity. The idea was to allow its creator to get everything operating smoothly before inviting the likes of me — a former Tokyo correspondent for this paper and lover of Japanese food — to try it out. “It allowed us to get into a rhythm and develop synergy,” Minamishima-san says.

It’s just on 6pm and sommelier and manager Randolph Cheung, formerly of the Flower Drum and Asiana, sits me down with a glass of sparkling sake to begin the sushi and matched sake experience. To begin with it’s just the three of us — Minamishima-san, Cheung and me — in the restaurant. As I work through the first of 15 different kinds of sushi, Cheung explains the restaurant has been two years in the making.

The sommelier, who got to know Minamishima-san as a regular diner at Kenzan’s sushi bar, travelled several times to Japan to taste sake from various obscure producers and try to match it to his friend’s sushi creations.

The restaurant isn’t modelled on any particular place in Japan, but does draw on Minamishima-san’s favourite dishes and techniques from most admired chefs and restaurants in his homeland.

It’s pitched at a well-travelled (and well-heeled) clientele who have probably been to Japan and are perhaps familiar with the omakase dining experience. Expect to pay $150 a head for the food; add $70 for drinks. Minamishima-san acknowledges it is an ambitious project, but believes if the food is great, success will come.

“By giving my customers the best food and experience every time they come to Minamishima, I hope they will return not just as a customers, but as friends,’’ he says.

Ambitions are one thing, delivering on them another. But it quickly becomes apparent the restaurant is serving elegant and delicious sushi with great produce sourced from both Japan and Australia.

The first courses consisted of local white-fleshed fish: duckfish (also known as boarfish) and King Dory, followed by squid, sea perch and scampi. One piece of the dory comes topped with a delicious dab of a chilli and yuzu (citrus) paste that I have never tried with sushi, even in Japan.

Squid, or ika, is more often served in Japan with soy sauce (shoyu) and wasabi or ground ginger, but Minamishima has a nice variant, with one serve topped with smoked oak salt and another wiped with lime juice.

The executive chef, fingers a-whirr as he starts churning out nigiri (the standard fish-on-rice sushi) for patrons who’ve been arriving steadily as we chat, is telling me about a few dishes from his home prefecture Aichi.

I tell him Aichi is a sister state with Victoria and right on cue he produces some shellfish nigiri, the seafood flown all the way from his birthplace. The shellfish — mirugai and torigai — are delicious, and justifiably popular in sushi restaurants in Japan.

Minamishima-san follows this up with one of the highlights of the night, the first aburi, or flame-torched sushi — a delicious chunk of halibut fin, or engawa.

Cooked with a few swipes of the chef’s blowtorch, this dish is one I love but is perhaps not to everyone’s tastes — it’s fatty and smoky and very rich, although it has a touch of ponzu (citrus-based) sauce to cut through the fat. It’s served with another nigori (cloudy or unfiltered sake) from a family-run brewery in Nara called Suiryu. It’s nice, but the really interesting sake is to come, as we move on to the tuna courses.

Cheung, who has assembled a list of wines matched to each course, says most people choose to have the nihonshu, or sake. He pours the next drop into a whisky glass; it has a slight bronze tinge. Cheung explains it’s an aged sake from a husband-and-wife brewery in Tokushima, on the island of Shikoku. The result is a rich sake with an almost oily complexity that matches well with the tuna dishes Minamishima-san is putting on my plate.

All three are made from the highest quality bluefin tuna from Nagasaki in south western Japan. The first is akami, the reddy pink flesh from the fish’s flanks, and the last two ootoro, the fatty belly section of the tuna.

All three dishes are superb. The last is done is aburi-style, seared with the blowtorch, and matches beautifully with the last drops of the aged sake in my glass.

Leigh Hudson, a Japanese food and sake aficionado and owner of The Chef’s Armory, says there are very few interstate equivalents to what Minamishima-san is trying to achieve.

“I think he is trying to bring in that more fine dining aspect, which we haven’t seen a lot in Australia,’’ Hudson says. “He’s going more down the path of being a specialist Japanese restaurant.”

The restaurant is getting busy now and approaching its 40-seat capacity. Although it’s comprised of almost exclusively hard surfaces — wood, stone and tile — the acoustics are forgiving.

The tuna I have just finished was arguably the piece de resistance, but there is more to come in the form of maki, or sushi rolls, with saba (mackerel), anago (sea eel) and mountain yam.

These are served with the final sake of the night, and my liver, if not my tastebuds, heaves a sigh of relief.

As I get up to leave, I realise I have forgotten to follow up Minamishima-san’s comment about why he chose a “hidden place” to open his own restaurant.

He’s too busy now to interrupt with anything other than a brief goodbye, but I think I know the answer. It is a typically Japanese challenge to oneself: to consistently provide an experience good enough to draw people in from afar rather than relying on those who would stumble across it by accident.

On that front, he certainly succeeds.

Know your omakase

Omakase: The menu is entrusted entirely to the chef, who will place each item on a plate above where you are sitting for you to take with your hands or chopsticks. Casual chat with the chef is encouraged and he or she will advise if the sushi needs to be dipped in soy sauce. Wasabi is added if the dish requires it.

Gari: The pile of pickled ginger on your plate. Used as a palate cleanser between dishes.

Aburi:Sushi where the fish is broiled via a last minute swipe with the chef’s burner. The fish can be tuna, salmon or oily mackerel style species. Sauce is usually added by chef and soy sauce not required.

Temaki:Hand-rolled conical sushi, a home-style dish that’s served as an optional final extra here with diced tuna offcuts as the fish. Highly recommended.

Maki:Rolled sushi made with a bamboo mat, which is used to form strips of tuna, cucumber or other ingredients along with a mass of vinegared rice into long, seaweed-covered rolls.

Gunkan maki:Literally, “battleship sushi” — an oval-shaped puck of rice is ringed with a strip of seaweed (nori) sheet to make a cavity, which is then filled with fish. Minced tuna and sea urchin (uni) are common ingredients done this way, along with salmon roe (ikura).

Source: The Australian Rick Wallace  June 6th 2015