"The cold water doesn't get warmer if you jump late …”
Yesterday I assumed that the phonetic Kaiser referred to German ruler rather than a Japanese emperor with Goood Moooorning Vietnam signature dining spot …
Kaiza is located opposite the Enmore Theatre and it is a long restaurant with a couple of outdoor tables. You walk in past the chefs working in the small, open kitchen in the front room and there are a further two dining rooms with lots of booth tables. We are seated in the furthest back room. It's freezing cold this winter's evening and the back room is a bit warmer than outside with paper fans and lanterns, a faux log heater and dozens of scented candles. The chef is Jason Nguyen formerly of Chuuka in Pyrmont.
But whatever we do we must not mention the uncomfortable booths set up for individuals who are 2 meters tall …
Izakaya food is, at its core, drinking food. Kaiza Izakaya, a new arrival in Newtown, runs with the informality and snack-ready portions at the heart of this Japanese form of dining – but makes a decisive call on forgoing some of its other traditional elements.
For instance, it's not sticking to only Japanese flavours. The chef at its helm, Jason Nguyen, is combining a childhood watching his Vietnamese father cook for the family with his culinary education in Tokyo for a menu that melds Japanese technical acuity with the flavours drawing from the five elements of Vietnamese cooking: salt, sweet, bitter, spice and sour.
Come for scallops, or Toothfish, or Coffin Bay oysters tartened with a spicy nuoc cham, or a Wagu beef nigiri made of crisped rice (the kind you find at the base of a clay pot), and thin slices of snapper served with chili-lime dressing. There's a wagyu sirloin (with a marble grade of at least five, if you were wondering) dressed up with kombu soy butter and kizami wasabi, a version of the Japanese root that's chopped up and marinated in soy.
The menu is informal, easily divisible and has a casual elegance that makes it as smashable with a complex Pinot Grigio or Cab Sav by sommelier Theodore Nguyen - The wine menu had J and F favourite 2022 GREYSTONE (V, O) Waipara, NZ
Kaiza not Kaiser - MODERN JAPANESE WITH VIETNAMESE INFLUENCES
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Observation
It is hard to look at things,
harder to say what you see.
Rattle each grain of sand
in its grave of desert?
Why begin unless you intend
to see things to the end?
And do not rely on the words
you overheard in a dream,
not knowing what they mean,
how they sound, those half-shadowed
chess pieces maneuvering
in and out of thought, unthought.
Language goes hard as time
at the first understanding.
Everything goes inside it,
which is an unopened box . . .
vague outline of a blue box
against a black background.
Then your voice’s children
as they escape to the street,
as they wade into the crowd . . .
the wind sucks them through a bone.
A plume of exhalation
withers on the zero air.
We know only one thing,
as a novel knows one story,
like a closed book reading
its own discrete emotions
pressed to paper word by
word, comma by comma.
It is not only duration
allows our mouths approaching
by halves to sometimes kiss.
A word is startled by the eye,
and something is unknown,
if still discrete, no longer.
