Chiba Japanese

***

I'm not making art, I'm making sushi - Masaharu Morimoto

***

I wouldn't say I am a Japanese food enthusiast and I am certainly not Japanese, in fact I have only recently started dabbling in the cuisine properly over the past 2 months. Recently we were lucky enough to attend a nice little place called Chiba in Moonee Ponds (that's in Melbourne for all you foreigners). We were invited to this restaurant for my sister-in-laws 25th birthday. Normally I am concerned to try new places, but my sister-in-law has particularly good skills in finding nice places to eat, and she introduced us to the last Japanese place that I had grown quite a fondness for, so I was excited at what lay ahead.

I always like to let others order for me if they are introducing me to a new establishment, especially if it is a cuisine that I am still fairly new to, so I avoid the menu like the plague. We are there about 15 minutes before the other 4 that are still to join us which means engaging in pleasant conversation with my wife. The waitress, in her typical Japanese courtesy provides us with an abundance of bow's and thankyou's while topping up our glasses with room temperature water. My wife scours the menu for anything that might be familiar from our other Japanese experiences and points a couple out to me.
"This place looks good!" she is also excited about the upcoming experience.
The remainder of our dinner party arrives and after some chatter around the table and birthday wishes, my sister-in-law gets down to business and starts spitting orders at the waitress who has made about 4 trips back and forth waiting for us to stop talking so she can take our order.

Before I get into the food, it's probably worth mentioning the establishment and service. It's a pretty standard Japanese restaurant in the inner city suburbs of Melbourne, situated at the end of a one way street running parallel to a busy shopping strip called Puckle Street. You walk in to a low lit restaurant which is pleasant on the bottom level with a few scattered tables by the counter and bar. We were seated upstairs in an area which looked like it could be sectioned off by a paper sliding door (I doubt it would block much noise). In addition to the paper sliding doors, the room was decorated with burgundy coloured paintings of a particular tree which I am told is a cherry blossom. I am looked at like I have two heads for not knowing more about plants and trees. Whether this is actually a Japanese tradition or not I couldn't tell you. For all I know it could be as traditional as an Italian restaurant plastering pictures of Ferrari's and soccer players on their walls.

First up, edamame. This delightful little dish is what we would call a bowl of soy beans, in fact the description is lightly salted soy beans. The term lightly salted was taken very seriously, I am sure there wasn't any salt at all, but they were actually a good way to start the meal.
The main dishes come to the table and I fall in love with it all.
Let's talk about the Soft Shell Crab Rolls first. Awesomeness at it's most awesome. Lightly flavoured soft shell crab melts in your mouth, you need to bite through rice paper and rice to get to it which you instantly find annoying once you realise what you have been missing your whole life. Cut out the rice and give me freaking crab!
There was the standard plate of inside out sushi rolls; one plate of crispy prawn and a plate of raw tuna, they tasted great. This was also the first time I had tried sashimi, and I came out of there pretty happy with myself and thinking it might be a permanent fixture on future visits to Japanese cuisine.
Then came the next course, the Wafu steak. Bits of tender steak cooked in a wafu sauce which is a kind of thick sauce I would put in a barbecue category. It was reasonable, but I have had better steak. The steak was accompanied by some steamed vegies and a great Japanese interpretation of an Aranchini. They probably invented it, but it was the first thing I thought of when I sunk my teeth into it, so to me they are simply Japanese Aranchini.
We also had the pot stickers and some Japanese spring rolls... not much to say about them really, other than my wife like the pot stickers so much that we needed to order another serve.

One issue...
The sushi was cut way too big to stick in your mouth without looking like you have been stung by bees while you are trying to get rice out from your cheeks. As anyone that has tried to eat sushi before would know; when you bite into sushi, what remains falls all over your plate and you spend the next few minutes using your chop sticks to drop each of the discarded grains of rice into you mouth. Smaller pieces would have been better.

So what's the go?

You have to get down to this place and get your face around the Soft Shell Crab Rolls. Everything was pretty good, but man, that crab... love that crab... mmm... crab. Sweet sweet soft shell crabby wabby.

- siamo alla frutta -