This will probably be less a food review and more a journal as I am writing this over a year after the fact. It will be a real test of what aspects of the meal were memorable with my first omakase experience!

High level summary was that I can’t really remember any stand out dish. The service was good, but the environment was a bit unfriendly / sterile. The restaurant itself was located down a dark alley in Richmond and my initial impressions of the place was that it seemed like a brutalist office.

To get to Minamishima, I had to catch a tram to what felt like quite far out of the CBD. This tram trip was my first encounter with a ticket inspector in Melbourne, going around and checking if people had touched on. I hadn’t and got off the tram early to avoid being fined. One distracted man didn’t do this and got a fairly hefty fine.

It was June and I remember being quite cold in the restaurant, being seated closer to the entrance and near the sink where the chef’s were preparing food. There was only a maximum of around 10 diners in the restaurant, and we were all seated on one side of a bar, facing chefs standing in front of a wall meticulously preparing each portion. The ratio was about one chef to every two diners.

I remember that next to me was a very loaded Asian man, dressed extremely casually – almost as if he had just decided on a whim to go to an omakase and hadn’t even bothered to change out of his pyjamas. He got every single add on to the meal, and the chef seemed to preempt a lot of dishes for him. I wondered how he was so wealthy.

I just had the standard omakase set.

I don’t remember feeling hungry after the meal, but I do remember feeling dissatisfied. Nearby to Minamishima was a Japanese bottle / alcohol shop, “Sake Ginza Richmond”. Wandering in, it felt good to experience by contrast the warmth and coziness of this little shop. I really wanted to buy something so got a honeydew ice cream in plastic, pale light green container that looked like the fruit. The Japanese shop keeper remarked that this particular dessert was strongly nostalgic for him as he used to eat so many of them as a child. Funnily, this ice cream is something I still remember more than any of the dishes at Minamishima.

Location

4 Lord Street, Richmond VIC 3121