Truly Scrumptious

Next to Pier Street car park in Perth is a little alley called McLean Lane. If you didn’t know about it, you wouldn’t know it’s there but it’s a bustling little touch of Tokyo with Teppanyaki bars, and right inside is a tiny twelve seater restaurant called Ginza Midai. The menu is quite small, but the dishes are all carefully thought out by chef Midai. It’s quite expensive for the amount of food that you get, but the food is top quality. There is also a selection of wines, sake and beers.

The waitress went through the menu recommending dishes to us and we chose four things. The restaurant is so tiny that most dishes are passed across the counter as there’s not a lot of room to manoeuvre. The first dish we chose was an anago and smoked radish potato salad.

It was quite unexpected. I thought it might be a leafy salad with potato and eal, but it was more like a regular potato salad with cold mash, anago eel and iburigakko (smoked daikon). Very tasty.

The next dish was the assorted sashimi, which looked amazing and I was really looking forward to trying. The plate contained sea urchin, scampi, scallop pudding, two types of tuna, squid, white fish and seaweed paste. The fish was super fresh and very good quality. I’d never had sea urchin before and found the flavour quite intense. The scampi and tuna were the stars of the plate.

Next came sukiyaki, another new dish to me that was reminiscent of a steamboat in other cultures. We had a burner placed in front of us with a very hot clay pot of broth, tofu, greens and mushrooms. We were given a plate of premium wagyu with some extra chopsticks for the raw meat, and instructions to dip the meat in the broth for ten seconds then dip it in the rich egg yolk sauce. We followed the instructions and also drank the broth and ingredients with our ladles. The meat was incredibly good and the egg yolk sauce very special.

The last dish was a bowl of rice cooked in scallop broth with dried scallop and ikura (salmon roe). Again very tasty and nice fresh roe.

Well this restaurant was definitely an experience and I wish I had tried the Oden (vegetables in broth) that I saw other customers trying. I think if you are looking for a real Japanese experience, it’s a good place to try.

Last visit – May 2025

Click here to find out more