Aussie

House-cured slices of buttery salmon plated with cream cheese, rice crisp clusters, bubbles of yuzu "caviar", baby radish, fried capers and pickled wakame.

Looks pretty, but unfortunately, all that effort on the plate – there are so many components – didn't show up in its taste. Everything seemed incoherent and I just didn't get it.

Crumpled ribbons of homemade tagliatelle made fresh in the morning, inked and stained with salty squid ink – I thought I tasted a hint of cheese in the first few mouthfuls, but it disappeared after that. Be sure to mix the three types of fish roe (ikura, tobiko and mentaiko) and crispy flour pops into the pasta so you get different layers of saltiness and textures in every bite.

Kudos, especially, for the gorgeous sashimi-grade Hokkaido scallops just briefly seared so they were left mostly raw, which is exactly how sashimi-grade scallops should be – un-ruined.

THIS. IS. DA. BOMB. Its crisp exterior glazed with homemade dehydrated blueberry sugar belies its thick, cushiony texture inside that veers toward an actual cake. Its plush crumb, studded and stained with blueberries and their juice, is moist and somehow manages to be dense yet fluffy simultaneously.

Seeing the generous litter of fresh berries and pine nuts across the top of the hotcake made me very, very happy – I love pine nuts. And to cap it all off, that scoop of ricotta, mascarpone and cream cheese is just gorgeous when smeared on the hotcake.