Rock 'n' roll izakaya smells like theme spirit at Kid Kyoto

At Kid Kyoto, the bill arrives in a CD case. Well, of course it does. This place is themed to death. Inspired by a meal in a Tokyo restaurant taken to the strains of Nirvana, the entrepreneurial Dr Sam Prince (Zambrero, Mejico, Indu) has created a party-time izakaya in a CBD back lane that's just busting to office-Christmas-party your night away.

The story goes that Prince and former China Diner chef Seb Gee then jumped into a studio with a DJ and created an album of eight mash-up tracks from '90s hits, which now forms the basis of the restaurant's playlist. Or something like that.

You can't theme a restaurant on the grunge and rock scene of the '90s and not have the noise level ear-bleedingly loud, so I may have missed the finer points.

"People say to me you've over-engineered this, but I just wanted to do it," Prince recently told an online magazine. Oh, I wouldn't call it over-engineered, Sam. Just because the menu is divided into Intro, Raw and Unplugged, Main Stage, B-Sides and Encore.

And the signature dish – Black Hole Sun pork belly – takes its name from a Soundgarden hit. And the long, dark, brick-lined room has grunge lyrics, torn music posters and neon on the stripped-back walls, over-hung with metallic chandeliers.

For Gee, izakaya is more a state of mind than a codified list of dishes; more a starting point than a finishing one. Smoking salmon sashimi ($24) sees slices of nori-wrapped raw salmon topped with salmon caviar and pea shoots sitting in a pea-green sauce, wreathed with smoke. Looks amazing, tastes a little muddled.

Preserved lemon chicken tsukune ($16) is another riff, the tender, grill-marked chicken patties served with a nest of fried leeks and a single, soft-yolked onsen egg. Clever and compatible, it works well.

Grilled wagyu +4 sirloin with a puddle of "red hot chilli pepper" miso ($42) is pretty tame, but a dish of sake chicken with lotus root and shiitake ($30) has a great Sunday-roast, cooked-on-the-bone flavour and heaps of umami. It seems to be oddly chopped, however, so that every piece I pick up with chopsticks is difficult to gnaw.

Belly pork yakitori with quandong and karashi mustard ($12) has been pushed too far, the fat rendered to jelly but the meat dry. Jasmine rice ($4) is over-cooked and pasty.

I was prepared to write off Kid Kyoto as a one-hit wonder, but a further weekday lunch of steamed Cone Bay barra ($32) in a smoky, dill-flecked, corn-sweetened dashi broth shows more promise, as does chahan fried rice ($18), crunchy with tiny little bubu arare rice beads, and seasoned with all sorts of delicious sprinkles.

A shallow dessert-scape of calpis granita (icy but nicey, made from Japan's strangely addictive, Yakult-like cultured milk), strawberry eucalyptus sorbet, compressed honeydew and black sesame ($16) is a remix that can't help but be refreshing.

Workable for lunch, and more rock'n'roll for dinner, this is one crazy kid, throwing ideas and ingredients around like a band trashing a hotel room.

I'm pretty sure that writing a menu as if it were music is a silly idea, but you can't knock the passion. I'd sign off with "play it again, Sam", but only if he promised to turn down the volume.

The low-down

Vegetarian Token veggo dish in each section, plus all the (B-)side dishes.

Drinks Genuinely interesting French and Oz-led wine list, good Japanese beers (Orion), premium sake, and cocktails using bespoke gin from Archie Rose.

Go-to dish Preserved lemon chicken tsukune, onsen egg bird nest and chilli rayu, $16.

Pro tip The chef's table runs a "compilation album" menu for $110pp, although I am not sure what that means.

Terry Durack is chief restaurant critic for The Sydney Morning Herald and senior reviewer for the Good Food Guide. This rating is based on the Good Food Guide scoring system.