Choose your own omakase adventure or play sushi snakes at ladders at suburban gem Kame House

Previous SlideNext Slide

Kame House, a smart-casual Japanese diner where the omakase menu is $230 and the smaller meal sets start at $58, might be the biggest gamble I’ve seen a restaurant group take all year. Par for the course at Circular Quay, but a seismic dice roll among the cake shops of upper north-shore Gordon.

When I roll up on a cold Saturday night, I’m the only person at chef Tomoyuki Matsuya’s eight-seat counter. This feels wrong. Both the counter and timber-framed dining room should be packed. After one bite of the first course – octopus massaged by hand to become extraordinarily tender, and marinated in sake, soy and mirin – I’m already plotting my second visit.

The owner, Azabu Group, also operates Chatswood’s glitzy, wagyu-focused Choji and its hotpot offshoot Hanasuki. Kame House was created as a place for Matsuya to showcase his sushi, and few things beat eating his signature salmon seconds after it has been gently scorched, the oils becoming soft and silky against seasoned rice.

Matsuya’s 15-dish omakase menu takes about two hours to complete and, common to the form, orbits around a daily-changing selection of nigiri (fish hand-pressed on rice and occasionally brushed with a rich and mellow barrel-aged soy sauce).

The room spins. My knees weaken. It’s the perfect bite.

The nigiri is served “okonomi”-style, meaning you get to choose your own sushi adventure. Matsuya will present a wooden box holding 16 morsels of sashimi and ask you to pick 10 from the line-up of usual suspects and a few rarities, such as engawa (flounder fin).

It’s a beaut system if you’re not mad about the brinier ocean notes of sea urchin or mackerel, say (go for the sweet paradise prawn instead). It also means omakase veterans can target fan favourites, such as anago (eel) and otoro (the fattiest part of tuna belly). And don’t worry if you don’t speak fluent sushi: staff are happy to guide diners through what’s what.

Everyone, however, should choose that signature salmon: a creamy, fat-ribboned slice of soy-marinated belly topped with a frizz of fried leek. The room spins. My knees weaken. It’s the perfect bite.

Other nigiri highlights include a pudgy white scallop crowned with an inky-black cluster of caviar, and the buttery engawa sharpened by pickled wasabi. Each rice grain is finely tuned with an aged red vinegar from Matsuya’s hometown in Japan’s Hokkaido region.

You can also expect thick slices of tuna on a bed of wasabi-spiked spinach. There’s hot-buttered abalone lifted by the zest of fresh yuzu. There’s crumbed and fried blowfish (don’t worry, we’re in the hands of a fugo professional) dolloped with tangy tartare. It’s like the most delicious fish finger you’ve ever tasted.

The standard meal sets are just as engaging. Pick of the bunch is the “Next Gen Chirashi”, inspired by a sushi “chequerboard” design Matsuya’s then 11-year-old daughter, Mone, conceived during lockdown. Chirashi means “scattered sushi”, but there’s nothing random about the way each square of seafood – whether it’s crab, eel, scampi or luminescent pearls of flying fish roe – is layered over diced tuna and rice.

Think of it as a condensed omakase you can eat at your own pace, jumping around the board as if it’s snakes and ladders. It’s also – take a deep breath – $145, but you’re getting top-tier fish, plus side bowls filled with miso soup, picked vegetables and chawanmushi, everyone’s favourite steamed egg custard.

For a slightly more affordable $95, I can also recommend the kaisendon set, starring octopus and precision-cut sashimi on a cloud of white-soy foam.

Some luxury sushi restaurants in Sydney feel as if they’re cordoned off to us mortals, catering exclusively to a “bromakase” culture of diners more keen to spend thousands on grand cru chardonnay than pay attention to what they’re eating. Kame House isn’t one of those places. Wines start at pub prices ($12 for a glass of King Valley prosecco) and there’s a kids’ menu featuring udon noodle soup with vegetable tempura ($12).

It’s still expensive, absolutely, but I don’t feel as if I’ve been fleeced. I feel, instead, as if I’ve been nourished by a chef who purely wants to make people happy through food. I hope more people will be keen to experience Matsuya’s generosity.

The Kame House website describes Gordon as a “faraway little town”. Management might consider changing that to “only half an hour from Central”.

This review was originally published in Good Weekend magazine