Suffering post-Japanese holiday blues? This intimate 12-seater could ease your suffering

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Post-Japan depression, to quote the title of a post a mate sent me on Instagram, is real. One moment, you’re wandering the backstreets of Tokyo’s Asakusa neighbourhood, high on Japan’s irresistible blend of culture, sake, food, sake, record shopping, sake and scenery. The next, you’re madly Googling onigiri recipes because doughnuts no longer cut it as a convenience store snack.

The surest way to beat these post-holiday blues, or battle all the FOMO generated by all that Japan travel content clogging up your social media feed? Eat some Japanese food stat, preferably in a place where the dining experience hews closely to the riaru makkoi back in Japan. A place, perhaps, like Gyouten in North Perth.

Its dining options (the restaurant only serves omakase tasting menus) include a $300 Friday night kaiseki featuring snow crab, lobster, pufferfish and other high-end seafood. While this asking price is a serious chunk of change, the flipside is that, on Saturdays and Sundays, Gyouten offers an eight-course shoken kappo option for $99 – a buy-in that, as far as Perth Japanese tasting menus go, sits at the more approachable end of the scale.

The eight-courser is a great introduction to the cooking of chef-owner Huijie “Jay” Zheng, who spent close to a decade criss-crossing Japan to understand the country’s food culture. Zheng’s culinary North Star is Kyoto, the former capital of Japan and the nation’s cultural wellspring. In the same way that blokes on dating apps pride themselves on the size of the fish in their profile photo, chefs from the Kyoto school of cooking hang their hats on the quality of their dashi stock: a cornerstone of Japanese cuisine and a real highlight of dining at Gyouten.

While Zheng’s dashi isn’t strictly traditional – he uses dried shiitake to bolster the usual kombu and katsuobushi one-two – it still embodies the cuisine’s ideals of poise and quiet refinement. My first encounter with it was during the soup course near the start of the meal alongside a chunk of fatty grilled grouper that helped emphasise the soup’s crystalline savouriness. The dashi makes an encore later as the hero of a zippy sauce for green tea soba.

Seafood is another pillar of Japanese food culture and offers its chefs further opportunities to flex. Tender molten mackerel set in the vinegary jelly known as tosazu was another cooling treat. Sesame sauce was an unexpected accent for chewy flaps of raw snapper. Entombing freshwater eel in an all egg-yolk batter and frying it twice made for exceptionally crunchy tempura.

Some dishes, though, left less of an impression. Grilled scallops and doughy mochi piled onto limp nori tasted like less than the sum of its parts. Our yakimono – the “grilled thing” in a traditional Japanese menu and usually the meal’s high point – was farmed Tasmanian salmon: a fish that’s hard to get excited about. Still, Zheng did a bang-up job grilling it over Japanese binchotan charcoal, so I’m confident he’d do justice to the more expensive stuff served on other menus. I also accept that, at this price point, a chef’s fish buying choices are limited.

Try to arrive for your reservation on time. Rideshare issues meant we arrived 10 minutes late for our booking. As a result, after sitting down and being asked about our drinks choices, we were quickly served our first course – pre-plated, although in the world of Japanese dining, this is par for the course for cold appetisers – with little in the way of introduction.

Zheng and the other two staff members all played a part in cooking, serving and cleaning, so service could, at times, wane. Then again, rushing and pushing is to be expected when you’re a tight kitchen team trying to get a lot of plates out. But as the night progressed, Zheng came out of his shell, particularly once the bulk of the cooking was done and he had time to chat and interact with diners, like when he grilled leftover rice in a donabe clay pot to create okoge – crunchy cakes of rice that are Japan’s answer to the socarrat at the bottom of a paella pan.

If you’re lucky, Zheng may offer you a taste of his house-made umeshu made by
steeping unripe WA plums in Japanese shochu spirit. It’s not just a fine dance
partner for the matcha kakigori (shaved ice) dessert that might end your meal. It also distils the essence of Gyouten into a glorious, seasonal treat that brings together east and west, new and old.

I’m looking forward to watching and tasting the story of this promising newcomer unfold over the years and seasons to come.

Good Food reviews are booked anonymously and paid independently. A restaurant can’t pay for a review or inclusion in the Good Food Guide.