Find curry croissants and mochi pizza at this jazzed-up Japanese cafe and shochu bar

What do you get when you combine a tiny kitchen with exposed concrete and formal jazz training? Shochu nights at one of the most spiritually Japanese spots in town.

Just under a decade ago, Tats Kawabata sought to pay homage to Japanese kissaten (teashop) culture. He aimed to offer a point of difference to Melbourne’s other Japanese-style cafes “that were like restaurants” and missing the more pared-back approach typical of the kissaten he remembered. When Kawabata viewed a seemingly unworkable Fitzroy North space, reminiscent of the concrete minimalism of renowned architect Tadao Ando, he knew he had found what he needed.

Today, Taiyo Sun quietly welcomes you through a nondescript doorway which opens into a narrow corridor. A neon cat, hanging plants, and a long bench grace your passage as you’re drawn into a room no bigger than a single-car garage. A dual-function venue, Kawabata greets you by night, or his partner Mao Tega and a small team welcome you by day.

Shochu nights have been a more recent fixture, where Kawabata showcases the (literal) spirit of his home island of Kyushu. Shochu distillation uses koji (a type of mould) to ferment a base ingredient; currently, you can select from barley, buckwheat, and sweet potato pours, best served with ice, soda, or perhaps neat. The Kuro Kirishima shochu, for example, has a subtly earthen and almost umami character that belies its sweet potato origin. Towari buckwheat shochu bears a smooth, toasted quality where savoury notes yield to a sweeter finish. If it’s mixed drinks you’re after, the chuhai range uses citrus mixers and a cleaner rice-based shochu. (Or, if shochu isn’t your thing after all, there are several non-alcoholic, beer, or sake options.).

The space is an exercise in austere functionality. One man, four burners, an oven and a toaster require the evening bar menu to be treated with deftness and concision. Edamame are a familiar entry point. A potato salad contains tiny hunks of iburigakko (smoked, pickled white radish imported from Japan’s mountainous Akita prefecture), with delicately fried kale and a dusting of seaweed. The dashimaki tamago is an omelette made to order, where the egg is folded with a seaweed- and bonito-based stock. Level this up by asking for the addition of mentaiko (salted cod roe).

A mochi pizza sees chewy cubes of glutinous rice placed atop a simple dough-and-cheese disc, garnished with fine slivers of dried seaweed. These dishes are united in being ideal drinking snacks. As you alternate between bites and sips, take in the mellow ambience of unobtrusive instrumental jazz or electronic music, soft ripples of intimate conversation, and an aesthetic that cultivates introspection. Kawabata’s background as a musician has found a clear parallel in this composition of an experience rarely found in Melbourne.

By day, dappled light filters through trees and long windows to play upon cracks in the polished concrete floor. This might mesmerise you between sips of coffee courtesy of Wide Open Road roasters, or one of a selection of loose leaf teas and matcha lattes. Scones are baked in-house, Brioche by Philip purveying shokupan and indulgent doughnuts. The daytime food menu is similarly brief. Three-cheese toast with honey manages to be light and subtly rich at the same time.

If you’re after a more substantial hot lunch, consider the curry. Like most Japanese adaptations of Western food, the approach of homage, innovation and refinement results in a genre of curry that is, broadly speaking, simultaneously familiar and novel. It’s a pleasing counterpoint to the innumerable ones I’ve enjoyed courtesy of my South-Asian heritage. Rice with rangiri-cut carrot, zucchini, green beans and onions are cooked in a thick sauce that blooms on the palate with a complex spice and a slow, mild glow of chilli.

If feeling more experimental, try the curry croissant – in a move of seemingly paradoxical but restrained maximalism, grilled cheese on airy pastry halves works incredibly well with the vegetable curry. Day or night, there is always room for quiet surprise here.

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