hellbent on visiting at least one new restaurant before i leave for KL and thailand, i made a reservation for four at shoya (25 market lane, melbourne 03 9650 0848). when i called the waitstaff informed me that there were three types of dining. the bottom is a smokeless japanese barbecue, the middle is a traditional horigotatsu style area where you have to take off your shoes and sit at a sunken dining table, and the top is a fine dining area. i opted for the horigotatsu area.
we opted to share a bunch of dishes and spent a bit of time navigating through the fairly extensive menu. the waitress we were allocated certainly had her upselling techniques down pat, although while i’m sure it wasn’t her intention i felt just a little bit uneasy with her. we started off with a sashimi platter.

which arrived with a bloody huge lump of wasabi which completely distracted me from the seafood! the waitress assured us that we just HAD to have a selection of chef-selected sashimi. as you can see, some pretty fantastic cuts of fish including salmon and tuna belly, scallop and salmon roe, snapper, clams, swordfish and so on. while i really enjoyed the whole dish, this might be more my fault for not double checking than that of the waitress but she was very good about wording her recommendation in such a way that we had no idea we had actually been sold a sashimi platter that was double the price of what we had originally asked for. again, i suppose that that’s their job but being fully aware that it was our first time at shoya, i personally would have appreciated a heads up.
we opted for a dish that was touted as shoya’s ’signature and must try dish’ of mashed scallops wrapped around a quail’s egg and shiitake mushroom.

visually, like all the rest of shoya’s dishes, this was stunning. taste wise though, i really didn’t feel that this stood out at all. i could not taste the scallops, instead it felt like i was eating a bog-standard piece of yong tau foo.
we opted to try one of the daily specials, a lobster tail with a soft japanese omelette topped with the chef’s special thickened sauce.

our waitress had told us that we should get 4 pieces (as she did quite frequently throughout the ordering process) but wanting to be able to have a bit more variety we just went for 2 serves. I’m sorry, but this was just NOT worth $15 a piece. the sauce was overly starchy, the flavour was bland and while the lobster was fresh, it just wasn’t interesting.
i took a really bad photo of a duck dish marinated in miso so i haven’t included it here. while the duck was cooked really well, the bed of noodles the meat sat on was overly sweet.
we also decided on two serves of a wagyu tar tar (take on tartare, i’m guessing) with a marinade of miso paste.

again, visually stunning but taste wise – blah. the beef tartare at horoki was miles better (not to mention cheaper!).
we rounded off with steamed rice and two hot dishes. the first of which was the nasu dengaku – fried and grilled eggplant with prawns topped with fresh sea urchin miso paste.

this was my favourite dish of the night. the eggplant was lovely and firm, the sauce was wonderfully tasty and went really well with our steamed rice and the prawns added a lovely crunch.
we also ordered the saikyo moyomi-yaki – a marinated grilled white fish.

this was average, i immediately compared this to nobu’s black cod with miso and this came out second best. probably an unfair comparison, but the similarities to strong to ignore.
feeling a bit underwhelmed with the meal, we decided to leave without having dessert. i may go back one day to try the barbecue on the ground floor, but for the price we paid i would much rather have gone to nobu, or even horoki or yoshi for half the price. the experience and food quality would have certainly been on par.