I didn’t have any trouble getting a booking at Tempura Hajime, though I very nearly could have done. The morning after we made our booking, John Lethlean’s review appeared in The Age and, with all the force of a small explosive device, blew the restaurant’s cover and dragged it kicking and screaming into a spotlight it had no desire to be in. I myself had heard about the restaurant a couple of weeks earlier, in the blogosphere, where the food bloggers, fearful of the inevitability of the mainstream media catching on, discussed it in hushed, conspiratorial tones; Tempura Hajime, they were whispering to one another, is something else entirely. And it is.
The Tempura Hajime experience begins the moment you pick up the phone: the booking process involves being given a curious set of directions (“Look for the big, black door,” we are told); the booking is confirmed with a text message asking you to call the restaurant back; and arriving on the night is to discover, not only the nondescript façade of what appears to be an office block, but also a deadlocked door. Fiercely private and notoriously publicity-shy, the restaurant’s signage is on its inside wall.
After ringing the bell at the appointed time, my dining partner and I are led into a small, dimly lit waiting room, where we’re given the option to either sit and enjoy a drink at our leisure or else go on through to the restaurant immediately. By this stage, the air of anticipation is tangible; to take any but the latter option would be almost masochistic. We go in.
The space is no larger than a medium-sized living room, with twelve large dining chairs seated around a wooden counter that separates the diners from the kitchen. Our chef—the intimacy of the environment inspires a sense of personal attachment—welcomes us from the other side of the membranous, half-octagonal bar, oscillating between two copper burners of quietly bubbling oil and a cental preparation area where he flours the ingredients for each of the evening’s twelve courses of tempura. We take our seats and it’s on for young and old.
The show—and there is something humbly theatrical about the whole experience—kicks off with six of the most perfect pieces of sashimi I’ve ever eaten: two exceedingly fresh pieces each of kingfish, tuna and gurnard, slippery and cool, accompanied by a small bowl of soy sauce and a daub of freshly grated wasabi. Prepared simply, but with consummate skill, the fish is exemplary, its taste definitive. As such, it hints at one of the evening’s recurring themes: an emphasis on the essence of each ingredient—on the purity of each sovereign flavour, on taste as a Platonic absolute.
This is as true of the tempura courses as it is of the sashimi, if not truer. Each mouthful here inspires a one- or two-ingredient high. Somehow, rather than blunting or distorting the sovereign flavours of each ingredient, the tempura seems to heighten them, coaxing them out onto the tongue where they might be enjoyed in all their glory. Many times over the course of the evening it will feel as though we’re tasting things for the first time: fish, oyster, sweet potato, asparagus. Never has a prawn tasted so much like prawn, okra like okra, eggplant stuffed with chicken mince like…well, eggplant stuffed with chicken mince. The twelve courses—I won’t spoil the sense of discovery by listing them all here—are timed to perfection, arriving neither too soon nor too late, and are supplemented over the course of the evening by a cleansing Fuji apple saké and a small bowl of Japanese salad. I begin the evening with a glass of the house riesling and graduate to pinot noir somewhere toward the halfway point. It would have been nice to try something a little more interesting by the bottle, but my partner in crime is driving.
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We season each piece of tempura ourselves, with shredded white horseradish and tempura sauce, or with lemon juice and pinches of sea salt. By the time the penultimate course arrives—donburi with either a sweet soy or green tea dressing—our tastebuds have received a thorough workout. (I for one am still reeling from a marvellous piece of mushroom stuffed with prawn meat from a couple of courses back.) Desert is a tiny molehill of yogurt pannacotta; it’s a cleansing, not at all cloying, conclusion to a fairly bang-up experience.
At the end of the evening, after the other guests have left, my girlfriend and I stay behind to speak with our hosts. We talk about other good Japanese restaurants in Melbourne—Yu-U, Ocha, Shira Nui, Kenzan; about the difference between running a resteraunt in the city and one in South Melbourne (in the city you have to have a lunch sitting to break even); about where to buy good sashimi-grade fish. We also talk about the gushing review in Tuesday’s Age and the tidal wave of interest it inevitably provoked. It seems that after Necia Wilden, co-editor of The Good Food Guide, and Matt Preston, one of the newspaper’s two reviewers, both made appearances at the restaurant, its owners begun to worry that John Lethlean might have already visited. Flicking back through their reservation book—which has been, as of that fateful Tuesday morning, completely full—they quickly discovered—to their horror—that Lethlean had indeed already been, and was now out there, somewhere, writing. They apparently pleaded with the paper not to publish the review, which was of course published anyway, and if the three hundred phone calls they received in three days are anything to go by, it’s if someone had taken a bloody great rock and dropped it in the middle of the pond. They hope things will calm down in three or four months, but for now are resigned to playing for packed houses.
Of course, I understand where the restaurant is coming from, but I also understand Lethlean’s predicament; indeed, faced with a restaurant that deserves to be exalted and a pen that wishes to do the exalting, his predicament has become my own. Thankfully, however, there’s not much that my praise can do for the restaurant now that his review hasn’t already done. Tempura Hajime is booked out until August, and any argument in favour of keeping the place a secret is now well and truly moot.
And as we sit there, shooting the breeze, it occurs to me that Tempura Hajime really is unique among Melbourne restaurants. Not only does it house the city’s only pure tempura counter, but it’s also the only place I can think of where, upon finishing your meal, you could have such a candid and courteous conversation with your hosts. It’s also the only restaurant I can think of that wouldn’t kill for a review like the one it received. In short, I can’t think of a more modest restaurant. We leave promising to come back soon. Assuming, that is, we can get a booking.
The Scene, 23 May 2007
