Shizuka Ryokan
Lakeside Drive, Hepburn Springs
03 5348 2030
www.shizuka.com.au

I guess I shouldn’t be confessing this –seeing that this section of Hinch.net is known as The Hungry Hinch and I regularly review restaurants around Australia and around the world.

But. I did not have a meal in a restaurant until I was 18 years old. For two reasons. My small hometown in New Zealand didn’t have any restaurants and if they did my family could not have afforded to eat there anyway.

When I was fifteen, and got my first job as a brash young cadet on the Taranaki Herald newspaper, I could afford to eat out at the local greasy café with Formica-topped tables at the back of the fish and chip shop. After an under-age beer-guzzling session during the days of the “six-o’clock swill at the pub across the road from the newspaper office.

We would always order the same. There wasn’t much to choose from apart from fish and chips or deep-fried battered saveloys and grease-laden potato fritters that, for some reason, were called “ potato scallops”.

So we would have steak and eggs and chips smothered in Worcestershire sauce. The dish was actually known to drunks as “steak-eggsh-n-chips”.

My first real restaurant meal was shortly after I arrived in Sydney (by boat) and got a job as a Police roundsman on the Sydney Sun newspaper.

I wanted to impress a beautiful blonde reporter in “Sun

Women’s or “ Sun Social”. I suggested a bar. She suggested a restaurant and picked it. The Sukiyaki Room at King’s Cross.

(See, I knew I’d get to the Japanese point of this review eventually).

I’d never been to a restaurant let alone an eatery with dim lighting, no chairs, where you sat cross-legged on the floor and ate with chopsticks.

I must have seemed like an awkward, Kiwi yokel but I must have done something right. My date’s name was Lana Wells and a few years later I married her.

As I said the place was called The Sukiyaki Room and so we had Beef  Sukiyaki.

I was a bit daunted when an uncooked egg arrived, still in its shell and in a lacquered bowl. Hadn’t the faintest idea what to do with it but followed what she was doing by breaking it and dipping the cooked slices of beef in it.

In later years I became more fond of Teriyaki but had fond Sukiyaki memories. It was on the dinner menu at Shizuka and my dinner partner

(Mrs. Nosebag) wondered what on earth I was going to do with a raw egg.

It was part of a $60 multi-course banquet. Buckwheat noodle soba salad and sushi and pickled ginger and wasabi horseradish and a white miso soup.

Sadly, the fresh prawn and vegetable tempura failed the Hungry Hinch “temp” rule. If tempura is not cooked at the right temperature it is not tempting. Tempura batter has to be extra-light, golden and crispy. Cooked right the batter-wrapped prawns and capsicum and pumpkin and carrot and beans are delicious. Cooked badly the prawns and pieces of vegetable are soggy and claggy.

But that is forgotten when dessert is a mound of red bean paste served withy green tea ice cream.

Shizuka serves Japanese and Western breakfasts. The Japanese one is a doozy. Who would have thought they would be slurping on miso soup for breakfast?  There’s also Baked Atlantic Salmon with a caramelized Teriyaki glaze, pickled and crunchy daikon radish slices, a tangy salad of seaweed, cucumber and roasted sesame seeds plus cubes of pumpkin brushed with Sukiyaki sauce and black sesame seeds.

And something I had never eaten: A tiny Yamamomo mountain peach served whole with the seed.

Good food. Good atmosphere. See Hinch Travel for a critique of the  Shizuka Ryokan spa and resort.