A salmon and avocado roll is the trackpants of sushi – so comfortable and familiar you could have it everyday – but it’s also not very exciting. Sushi at Fujisaki, on the other hand, is an experience in edible art rendered in jewel tones. A plate of pristine kingfish, suedey tuna and creamy salmon comes with a tiny flower carved from a radish, a carrot butterfly and cucumber fringing. Your dinner sings and dances like Disney on rice.
In fact, all your raw seafood is treated like a diva on tour at Fujisaki. Five perfect nigiri are presented with a reverence usually saved for the displaying of precious stones. Tuna, salmon, kingfish and prawn are flawless, but it’s the swordfish, scored and gently kissed with an open flame, that is a creamy revelation for anyone who has categorised this regularly overcooked fish as ‘steaky’.
How do you make an appetiser feel like a million-dollar dish? You only serve luxury items – the culinary equivalent of silks and velvets – in a bowl of riches involving crab, uni and avocado. And that is what you come to Fujisaki for: a little bit of the high end Japanese dining that Melbourne has been doing so well of late at venues like Ishizuka, Minamishima and Kisume.
In saying that, don’t let all the beautiful glowing, backlit marble surrounding the bar and kitchen scare you – there’s a lot of familiar faces on the menu, like agedashi tofu and chicken karaage. And surprisingly, for a restaurant dedicating so much time and counter space to the art of sliced fish, their vegetable dishes provide equal thrills. Cauliflower’s reputation as a stuffed-shirt winter veg gets a summery makeover with florets gussied up in yuzu and pistachios, taking it into European flavour waters.
And that’s not the only fresh accent on executive chef Chui Lee Luk’s menu – a little cross-cultural pollination makes sense given her time in lauded Chinese, French, and Modern Australian kitchens across Sydney.
You could order a fancy spicy ocean roll filled with tuna, salmon and kingfish with panko crumbs for crunch, but we’re digging the inverted bo ssam in sushi form that involves salad wrapped in seaweed and rice, ssamjang sauce and stained glass-thin slices of 9+ Wagyu given a whisper of fire-treatment to soften the fats. And a single skewer of sake-marinated shiitake mushrooms, once dressed in a squeeze of fresh lime and chilli powder, starts to seem like this little robata went to Mexico and came back thinking it was a distantly related to a Margarita.
This is not eat-at-your-desk Japanese food. This is an all-class fancy sashimi palace in the city’s newest corporate dining hub designed to apply an elegant gloss when you’re celebrating clients won, mergers negotiated or hosting a top-tier business meeting in one of the private rooms. Fujisaki is a temple of calm, elegance and highly attentive service for when you’re feeling a bit extra and you want your food to match your mood.