Canberra's best restaurants: Malamay

Top 20 restaurants, Food and Wine Annual 2014: number 6.

An extraordinary restaurant, so oddball in the way it looks and the things it chooses to do, highly ambitious and smart also. Look to be enchanted and surprised, and adopt an adventurous mindset to get the full experience. To wit, the sake.

Sake is creeping its way on to our menus – at Aubergine also this year – but nowhere to this extent. If you're not an aficionado of this funky, chewy, varied and intensely warming drink, ask for small glasses to match each course and leave it to the staff – this approach has served us well. The menu looks to Sichuan, where you evidently find sour, less overt flavours, pickles, and, obviously, the mouth-numbing Sichuan pepper – sometimes overdone in a couple of dishes here that leave your tastebuds numb and lost for a while to anything else. And elsewhere in the vast west China, where you find meaty stews using Middle Eastern spices, and we've become fans of some of these offerings, especially an oxtail stew. It comes as great chunks of oxtail on the bone, the soft meat and gelatinous bits ready to be pushed apart, cooked with port in a super-rich gravy, spiced with cardamom and star anise.

Baby octopus with "chillied papaya kimchi" is beautifully handled, lovely octopus in sweet chilli sauce with and sour pickle. An eggplant entree highlights the meaty texture and umami flavours of this vegetable, slow-cooked with a sweet sauce, seaweed and sesame. In desserts, caramelised ginger cake might well be our favourite in all the city – a gluey, sticky bean-curd like ginger cake, warm, with maple and walnut ice-cream.

Not all of the food is as approachable, but it's a highly responsive restaurant out to challenge your ideas about Chinese food and not afraid of borrowing from elsewhere to create dishes that keep you glued to the plate. The best of the food here is among the very best anywhere in the city. As for the set-up, it's described as "black bamboo forest" meets 1930s Shanghai and that probably says it as well as anything.

Malamay
Burbury Close, Barton. 6162 1220. malamay.chairmangroup.com.au
Owner Josiah Li; chef Jeffrey Shim.
Lunch noon-2pm Tuesday to Friday; dinner 6pm-late Tuesday to Saturday.