Lilotang brings Tokyo cool to Canberra

The Chairman team runs restaurants to a high and unusual level of care, with an internationalism in the approach – and Lilotang fits this mould. The food is eclectic and immaculate, the service personable and professional, and the set up is Tokyo cool. This is an eatery that stands up in any company.

Strange thing is there's a measure of precision at Lilotang that Canberra really doesn't demand or even expect, which makes it rare at best.

The feel is great, cosy, smart, a little deconstructed in the decor, lots of cartoon detail in the colours and artwork, random drawings and writings on the bare tables, ropes swung from the ceiling. The tableware likewise – pebbles to rest your chopsticks, bespoke plates, an excellent collection of ceramic sake cups, no two alike, that is brought on a tray to the table so you can choose your own.

We have eaten our way through the core menu several times recently so when we ask for suggestions from the very clued-up wait staff we're happy to be persuaded to some of the dishes from the set seafood menu. Which is where the biggest astonishment and awe comes tonight.

The sushi plate ($24) remains fixed in mind, the one we will order on every visit.

Marinated tuna with sea urchin and egg yolk is masterful, the squares of tuna on top of a square of nori and a crisp, chewy straight-out irresistible rice cake, and on top a mix of sea urchin with egg yolk, lending such an salty ocean taste. Eel with topped with a little mix of shiitake mushroom sits on another rice square.

An impressive oyster dish follows. The oyster is served with oyster ice-cream which sounds ridiculous but turns out to be clean, delicate, creamy and fresh, cold on top of the warm, sweet, battered oyster. With a seaweed salad of crisp and fresh seaweed, and citrus ponzu, the dish works brilliantly, salty and fresh like the ocean.

A sashimi plate ($38) is complex, leaving us fixated especially by the calamari, which has been dried somewhere in the process, leaving it very soft but with an aged texture, and a heroic mint wasabi sauce. There's pickled peach with king prawns wrapped in snapper, Japanese scallops, bonito and other raw fish on this plate, plus crisp lotus root, all sauced with individuality and care, which is excellent and interesting.

In the more regular menu, the fish we order, Japanese alfonsino with pickled spicy apple in a miso sauce, is the one we find most challenging, possibly because by the time we get there we're already over-stuffed with food. The fish is firm and solid, not a flaky delicate flesh, and the flavour is strong. The lime and picked apple and yuzu amounts to a puckering study in sour.

The robata skewers ($16.50) meet general approval in our group, but for me the smokiness is hard to get past. It's real from a robata charcoal grill, but smoky food is not my thing. The chicken skewers are succulent , and the pork skewers unusual, the bacon-like strips and folded on to the skewer and served with yuzu sauce; one for the barbecue fans.

Pork belly ($15), slow-cooked for 12 hours, are squares of delicate fat, shocking and excellent at the same time, lightly crisp on the outside and so squishy on the inside they completely disintegrate to the bite, with a sticky Japanese mustard sauce adding to the general sense of excess.

"Sake-lees marinated" chicken ($31.50) also has the smoke of the grill permeating the skin, but it's confined to the skin, leaving the flesh fresh, and is served with a plentiful salad of coriander, sesame and spring onion.

Green tea duck breast ($34) comes sliced on top of a broth with an egg that has been fried tempura-style, and left for you to break into the broth – although in our case we don't find the expected runny yolk. Mushroom flavours dominate the warming shiitake broth.

Our dessert is over-presented in a haute-cuisine way, on the glass top of a box filled with dark pebbles. It's pretty stunning to eat, a wasabi ice-cream taking no prisoners and combined in a crazy burst of texture, creaminess, heat and citrus, with a sheep's milk yoghurt, more of that yuzu, this time in gel form, plus seaweed jelly and tiny apple cubes.

Another excellent thing here is the sake list – it's sensible, varied and the staff can guide you. So much more exciting and accessible than wine.

Lilotang is one of the best restaurants Canberra has. It's very much its own beast, a bit whacky, uncompromising and experimental, deeply committed to what it does.

It describes itself as "zen meets Harajuku", a reference to a teen-culture part of Tokyo, a description which explains where they're trying to head. The set-up is studiously casual and anything-goes.

But these kinds of restaurants are really aimed at the dining-out cohort, where you can't help but over-focus in a pretty obsessive way on what you're eating.