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Akiba, Civic

Kirsten Lawson
Kirsten Lawson

The Akiba restaurant's pork belly bun, char sui and Asian slaw.
The Akiba restaurant's pork belly bun, char sui and Asian slaw.Graham Tidy

14.5/20

Asian$$

If you want to know where dining is at, head to Akiba. It's loud, packed, full of flat caps, and has an anything-goes sense of casualness in the way things are done, the interactions of staff and diners, the ordering as you go, the quick arrival of food. As for the food, it has all you could hope for in trash credibility – in the best sense of the word, with an emphasis on smoke, the influence of Japanese snack food and the pork buns of American rock-star cheffing, and an obsession with extreme flavour.

This place combines Japanese cartoon pop with the United States love of the barbecue to bring you dishes like pancakes with kewpie mayo, Japanese fried chicken with lemon-braised onions and parmesan, and little roast spuds with cheesy mousse and teriyaki eel.  And that's even without the presence of their imported charcoal grill, which is yet to be fully installed and will lead to a revamp of the menu.

If you ever dined at Dieci e Mezzo, that fine diner with a sense of cool on-show elegance in the foyer of the ActewAGL building, you will be hard-pressed to see any traces or even to imagine yourself on the same ground. The Harrington brothers have wrought a complete transformation to this space, turning what was quite a cold sparse dining area into an intimate, tight-fitting, busy and involved diner. 

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Beef short rib with tamarind caramel and Thai basil.
Beef short rib with tamarind caramel and Thai basil.Graham Tidy

You enter off the street instead of through the foyer; the foyer is now closed off to the restaurant. Soon you will be able to eat at tables outside on the footpath. Inside the kitchen is deliberately open to the dining room with chefs and staff coming and going, all dressed in the same cap-on-head, khaki-coloured casual gear, a chef as likely to bring your food as anyone else.

The pancakes ($4 each) are fat, fresh and smoky, crazy bites of flavour. The sweet corn pancakes with togarashi (chilli) have a caramel sauce on top, which is sweet and a less-than-successful idea. The pancakes with kimchi, angasi oysters and itogaki (like bonito flakes; these guys like their obscure menu references) are more satisfying, a deep brothy taste contributed by the oysters, albeit with the regulation stripes of kewpie mayonnaise.

From pancakes to dumplings ($10 for four), and why not, it's all easy to pick up and eat in a couple of mouthfuls, using chopsticks, fork or fingers. The mushroom dumplings are great, delicate in the wrapper and highly mushroomy inside, with a sharp red wine vinegar sauce which is a little surprising and doesn't strike us as the best accompaniment. The black-vinegar dressing with the prawn and chicken dumplings works better. Kingfish sashimi ($12) looks good, but the delicate slices of raw fish are entirely overwhelmed entirely by the salsa – nahm jim, according to the menu – on top. 

The Akiba restaurant team: Mike Harrington, Pete Harrington and Dino Jugovac and chef Johnon MacDonald.
The Akiba restaurant team: Mike Harrington, Pete Harrington and Dino Jugovac and chef Johnon MacDonald.Graham Tidy
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Two roast halves of a little potato, though, are delicious, topped with a white mousse and pieces of barbecue eel – perfect. The soft pillowy David Chang-style buns ($8 or $9 each) are also simple and good, top beer food – like a one-handed burger. The fillings are simple – pork, dark barbecue-style sauce and coleslaw in one – this is our favourite; lightly treated chicken and pineapple salad in another; and soft shell crab, mayo and lettuce in a third. The soft-shell crab is a  little too fish-and-chippy and reminds you of a chip butty in white bread. But generally, these steamed buns are loved. 

The beef short rib ($20) is an excellent hunk of shredded dark meat, really nice, and not tricked up like some of the other dishes with chilli and crazy sweet and vinegary sauces. No knives have come to the table tonight, so it's just as well this is soft enough to come apart happily with a fork. We love this gelatinous deep meat.

The Japanese fried chicken is not a successful dish for us – deep-fried chicken, which is what this presumably is, is asking for trouble, popular as it might be, and the cooking technique dominates this dish. The topping is odd, a lemony pile of soft-braised onions and parmesan.

Desserts are very good – a chocolate "tart" ($9) not so much a tart as a thick pile of sticky caramel-like rich chocolate with lovely pickled strawberries. And a tofu cheesecake ($8), which is unmistakably a cheesecake, but has a light texture and is pretty with dark green squares of pandan jelly.

The wine list is relatively brief, with an emphasis on affordable mid-rangers that tick the right boxes on region – a chardonnay from Tumbarumba (the Chop), sauvignons from Orange (Gilbert by Simon Gilbert) and Adelaide Hills (Tomfoolery Tally-ho), pinot from Tasmania (Stoney), Tumbarumba (Bourke Street) and Geelong (Sangreal by Farr). A handful also from Europe. But the emphasis seems less on wine than on other offerings from the bar – a welcome three sakes and cool cocktails, alcoholic and not, including a range of "Akipop" juices.

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If Akiba categorically does not remind you of Dieci, it might well make you think of Eighty Six in the sense that the party has been called and you're here to have fun. It might also remind you of Soju Girl with the chilli and sweet Asian sauces, the sheer punch in the flavours with that modern presentation. Akiba adds an American edge also in the food and in the sense of diner cool. We visited in the first days of opening, still in the settling-in phase and with a temporary menu while they work out the installation of an all-charocal imported oven around which the menu proper will be designed.

Akiba was popular from the get-go and it's easy to see it staying that way. The key will be not to let that party atmosphere take over. It would be a shame if it became a place for people to think more about yelling than eating and with all this funster stuff going on it would be easy to lose focus on the food. But then Akiba is run by the Harrington brothers, who also have Sage at Gorman House. They're obsessed by good food, clear provenance, local suppliers and purity of product. Restaurants are their thing, plus there's the oven to come. All of which bodes very well for the food.

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Kirsten LawsonKirsten Lawson is news director at The Canberra Times

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