Cafe 928

You will spend longer than usual on the menu. Not because it is long, but because almost nothing on it is a combination you have eaten before — pasta with mala in it, donkatsu next to pizza, gochujang in a cream sauce. There is a short period of suspicion at the table, then somebody commits and everyone else follows.

The room is cute. Small, warm, a bit cluttered in the way places are when someone actually looks after them, and nothing like the glass-and-concrete you get further down the coast. It is the sort of room you settle into rather than perform in, which is why people bring their parents here.

The OJ and espresso comes as one drink. Two tastes that do not sound like they work come together into something quite interesting, and while you are playing it safe with the rest of your order it lands in a way that makes you wonder what else you should have tried.

Plates come out when they are ready rather than together, which suits the room and the pace of it. Nothing sits under a lamp waiting for the rest of the table.

The other thing you notice is who else is in there. Tables of people ordering without looking at the menu. Somebody's parents visiting from interstate. Students from the campus up the road. Half the room has clearly been coming for years.

The mala sauce is the one that catches people out. It builds slowly rather than arriving all at once, and by the end of the plate you are further into it than you thought you were going.

The noise is families and mates rather than music, and you can hear the kitchen from most of the room, which tells you how small it is.

Not many places survive a fire that leaves them empty for a couple of years. But here it stands, with the people coming back after that long to remember the flavour they could not get anywhere else.