Kisume

Spread across three Flinders Lane floors, this is Japanese dining staged as an event, a restaurateur better known for pan-Asian crowd-pleasers turning his attention to something more precise. Each level offers a different register. The windowless basement holds an open hot kitchen given to theatre: charcoal-seared raw wagyu with wasabi and daikon arriving under a smoke-filled glass dome, or wagyu dressed with salmon roe. The ground floor keeps things cooler and more classical, a New York-style sushi and sashimi bar working freshly cut Australian and New Zealand seafood. Upstairs is the quiet luxury: a mirror-and-brass Chablis bar with a glass wine wall, where Chablis alone runs to four by the glass and more than sixty by the bottle, and an omakase counter set behind velvet curtains. There, sushi masters run a long procession from nigiri to premium wagyu, one dish a seared wagyu sushi crowned with shaved truffle and smoked tableside beneath a glass cloche. It is polished, deliberately glamorous cooking, more concerned with spectacle and ingredient than restraint, a room that treats a meal as choreography and mostly earns the ambition.