238 High Street, Northcote, 9077 4772
My score: 3/5
Now I know why we need the word quirky in the English language: it’s to deal with Disco Beans, a rather peculiar but extremely winning Japanese restaurant more or less transplanted from Osaka’s underground art scene, where founder and chef Yuka Hart used to live. Art exhibitions and occasional performances are the backdrop to careful, simple homestyle Japanese food. It’s vegetarian (plus a little fish) and accommodatingly vegan or gluten-free if that’s the way you roll.
The snacks and salads are excellent food for scorching days: light, clean and fresh as a sea breeze. Two dishes riff on yukke, the Korean take on steak tartare, but instead of beef, there’s avocado or salmon tossed with a delicious marinade of soy, sesame oil and Japanese seven spice. Deceptively plain-looking pickles ‘ radish, carrot and cucumber ‘ are prepared in traditional nukazuke style, which means they’re fermented in rice bran mash. They retain their crispness and have a light tangy taste. Mock meat cubes, made from wheat gluten, have a crisp outer layer and fluffy centre. I’m no authority on fake flesh but this stuff is much more texturally pleasing than the scary health food store old boot I remember eating in my brief hippy period (five days in 1992). It comes with yummy soy mayo sauce.
Larger dishes include a slow-cooked spinach curry with a multigrain pilaf of white and wild rice, quinoa, millet and amaranth. It’s creamy and soothing and at $10.50 is a nice-priced summer dinner winner. Sukiyaki udon isn’t such a hot-weather star but it’s still tasty with fat noodles lolling in a soupy soy slick among vegetables and tofu. The desserts (all two of them) are worthy but the vegan chocolate banana cake is a bit rubbery and the strawberry fields forever ‘cheese’ cake is sugar free, dairy free, egg free and not quite fun free, though I did end up pining for good old cream and eggs and sugar.
Disco Beans is idiosyncratic. You can drink alcohol upstairs in the gallery room, which feels like a share house that’s between tenants, complete with bare light globes and an old couch that swallows humans whole. Downstairs is a dry zone (a liquor application is pending). Service is in line with the art collective lineage: friendly but tending to vague. Overall though, there’s enough spark, heart and tasty food here to ensure everyone leaves full of beans.
First published, The Age, December 5, 2010
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