Just Open: Chaki Chaki, Braddon

A new high-end Japanese restaurant with a balcony beer garden overlooking the street has opened in Braddon.

Chaki Chaki is perched on the first floor of the Ori building on Lonsdale Street, next to a gym and across from an architecture firm.

Owner and chef Yujiro Takeda previously owned the casual, cheerful Tasuke in the bus interchange in Civic.

But he's turned things up with the contemporary Chaki Chaki, a sweeping dining room filled with geometric wood cut-outs and hanging rope features on the ceiling. The menu is modern Japanese with French and European techniques.

He says he will be serving high end products - maguro or bluefin tuna sashimi, sea urchin from Tasmania, and tataki beef from top producers. "The ingredients are local, it's very, very high class. Every meat and seafood is top shelf," he says.

There are two tasting menus, with dishes such as sticky malt vinegar quail, slow cooked abalone with risotto and matcha tiramisu. Or you can order a la carte, where dishes are divided into cold (sashimi, octopus salad) and hot. Everything is seasonal. In a nostalgic touch, the table settings are printed with an image from the wall at Tasuke, where Takeda pasted hand drawn pictures of each dish along with its name in English and Japanese.

Outside on the glass walled terrace, there's plenty of room for a drink on a banquette looking out over trees and the hustle of Lonsdale Street. Takeda says there will be Japanese wines and sakes which aren't available elsewhere in the capital.

The gentle, cheerful Takeda is a third generation chef. "My grandfather is a sushi chef and my dad is as well, so when I was five or six years old I was always going to the kitchen," he says.

He tells of working for a decade in contemporary French and Italian cuisine in Japan before coming to Canberra about 20 years ago and opening up his first restaurant.

"Sushi and Japanese traditional [cooking] is my family work, so it's already inside [me]," he says with a laugh. "I'm using my skills 100 per cent for the Canberra commmunity - I hope people like it."

Chaki Chaki is on level 1, 28-30 Lonsdale Street, Braddon.

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