Matkim

Eight seats, one service, a single counter set into the Sydney Place precinct behind Circular Quay: this is Korean fine dining stripped back to the intimacy of a chef's table. The chef draws directly on Korea's Jeolla province, on his grandmother's cooking and on ingredients he still imports from home, from gamtae seaweed to Jeju mandarins, then filters them through years spent in Sydney's modern Australian and Japanese kitchens. The result is a long tasting menu that keeps surprising: yukhoe tangtangi, a beef tartare threaded with octopus; Western Australian marron in a crab-and-soybean soup; abalone sotbap, where fresh abalone meets rice cooked in the pot. Fire is central, an open kitchen and a visible dry-age fridge sitting within arm's reach of every diner, and the room around it is dark, spare and modern, the focus pulled firmly onto the counter. Dishes arrive with the chef's own narration, which turns dinner into something closer to a guided account of a region and a family. It runs Wednesday to Sunday only, and the format is deliberately uncompromising: no menu to browse, just an evening entrusted to one cook. Sweets close things out gently, a peanut praline choux and a mugwort macaron among them.