Kappo

Kappo is a style before it is a name, a form of Japanese cooking staged over the counter, where the exchange between chef and diner is half the meal. Here that counter belongs to a chef who trained at one of Melbourne's most serious Japanese kitchens before setting out on his own, and who builds each night around the mountain-vegetable and seafood traditions that give the genre its quiet, seasonal character. Guests choose a five, seven or nine-course chef's selection, then watch it assembled from the day's twenty-five or thirty ingredients: sea urchin, salmon roe and wagyu rump cap alongside yam, cherry-blossom leaf, candy beetroot and broccoli leaf. Red meat barely features; the emphasis falls on fish, vegetables and precise, unshowy technique. Because the format is a conversation, diners can tell the chef what they do and do not want, shaping the progression as it unfolds. The room, near the top of the city, is small and pared back, the attention pulled entirely towards the pass. It is degustation without the theatre of a large kitchen, closer to sitting at a friend's bench, if that friend happened to have spent a career learning exactly how much to leave alone.