Machi

Uni rice with roe piled on top. Crab kamameshi that arrives still cooking. Toothfish with truffle rice, which is the dish people describe to other people. Abalone rice. Sushi tacos with lobster or salmon in them, meant to be picked up with your hands.

Start with the nori potato balls and the gyoza. They come out fast, they are better than they sound, and they hold the table while everything else is being decided.

The seafood is very good and does not need much done to it, which is mostly the approach. Spanner crab tartare, aburi salmon, things that taste clean rather than clever. The uni turns up in more than one place and it is worth having it more than one way in a night.

A lot of the plates are handmade and you notice about three dishes in. They are heavier than restaurant crockery and no two are quite the same.

Sharing works better than ordering individually. Half of it arrives as things you pick up, and tables that go one-dish-each end up watching each other eat.

Cocktails lean citrus and the yuzu one is the one people order twice. It cuts through the richer rice dishes better than beer does.

The sake list is longer than the room suggests, and warm sake here is not an afterthought. It works better with the richer rice dishes than beer does.

The room is L-shaped, pale timber and dark tables, plants along the walls and an open kitchen down one side you can watch without craning. The kitchen is close enough that you catch the smell of things being seared before they reach anyone's table.

Most people turn up having already been down at the beach or along the pier, so nobody is dressed up. It fills and stays full, and the noise sits at the level where four people can talk and six will be leaning in.