Shunsai

You walk past it the first time. It sits on the ground floor of an apartment building on Wellington Road with almost nothing on the street to announce it, and then you are inside and the road noise stops, because the room is small enough that eighteen people talking is the entire soundscape.

Take the bar seats. You spend the evening about a metre from Shun, watching him work, and by the second dish you are talking to him instead of across the table. He will pour you something and drink with you if the night is going that way. It stops being a meal you were served and becomes an evening you were part of.

There is an order to the food, but it is not a rule. Tell him what you like, what you do not, what you have never had, and he will move things around. Give him notice and he will build the whole thing around you. It is a dinner for the diner rather than a form that restricts.

Ask where the wagyu is from. Ask about the seaweed. Ask about the rice. He will tell you in detail, because everything is made here, down to the sauces. Quality rather than quantity, and once you understand what is in front of you the size of the plate stops being the question.

Some nights there is fish flown in from the markets in Japan. Nowhere else in Brisbane is getting it.

The room fills slowly and empties slowly, and nobody is turning your table. By the last course the noise has dropped and the two or three conversations still going have merged into one. You will lose track of how long you have been sitting there.

Afterwards you step back out onto Wellington Road and it is suddenly very ordinary. Parked cars, a servo, the Gabba lit up a few streets over. Nothing about the street prepares you for the room, and nothing about the room follows you out except the feeling of having got away with something.