REVIEW: Fleur could be in Japan, LA or London but the impressive new restaurant is inside Perth’s The Royal

If you were to go to Fleur, close your eyes and eat in the following order, Shark Bay miso soup; torched beef tataki; prawns with shell tare and Wagin quail with aged soy, you would be hard-pressed to know what sort of restaurant you were in. Sure, it’s Japanese(ish) as you might discern from the ingredients but it’s not Japanese. What then? The soup is pellucid with flavour so savoury, so fragrant, so umami it makes you gasp with delight. It’s a dish you might find in an adventurous, young hipster bar in an alley off Togoshi Ginza. Beef tataki has texture, flavour and is so well composed, you might be in a Michelin-starred restaurant. The prawns, ridiculously, bombastically flavoured, are reminiscent of a snack you might find on a bamboo stick at a Thai market stall. Then there’s the quail with squidgy chunks of soft-cooked, fresh shiitake and XO sauce. It could be modern Cantonese cool or West LA hipster bar or London food truck or ... Now, open your eyes. It’s none of those things, but, somehow, all of them. You’re in a sleek, low-key, feminine dining room, surrounded by the vestigial architectural remains of a 140-year-old pub, with good art, muted tones, soft lighting and touches of granny’s beach house. The hilarious fish-shaped water jugs are straight from nan’s crockery cabinet. Fleur is in the middle of a great big inner-city boozer, the newly opened The Royal Hotel. Fleur is original, smart and clever. It is, at once, a Michelin one-star, street food, posh pub, three-ring circus food truck with infectious energy. It is one of those rarest of things in restaurant — an adventure. God it’s fun. Back to that soup. We’ve all had powdered, packet miso soup at our local Japanese. You’ve never had one like this. Fleur’s house-made version is more than a soup. It contains a handful of small clams in their opened shells. It is both powerful and subtle and with flavour of rare clarity. But it is the incandescence of umami and savoury notes that quite literally sets you back in your chair. Extraordinary, and at $9, it’s a steal. Beef tataki, $32, also shared the pinpoint accuracy of myriad complex ingredients combining in a treat of layered, cascading flavours. Smoke. Salt. Then acid. Now a mild bass riff of onion. A gentle twang of heat from wasabi leaf came next. Crowning it all, thin slices of soft, rich, room-temperature beef, torched and smoky in the tataki style, then draped, slumping over the garnishes like Dali’s clock. I wouldn’t sous vide a prawn. There doesn’t seem much point. But chef Chase Weber’s merry band of chefs has done just that with large, butterflied Skull Island prawns. They had been carefully peeled before being laid flat in a vacuum bag and given a warm bath to set the proteins. It’s a win for the customer: no fighting with shells and, potentially (or inevitably in our case) flicking a rich red, chilli vinegar sauce all over the shop as flesh suddenly separates from carapace in a shower of juice. The reduced prawn-head stock added to the house-made tare (pron: tar-ray) sauce was memorable. Plate-lickable. $21 for two prawns. The food is good. Very good. The duck breast, $39, is seared and rested pink. It has bite but remains tender. It’s served with a crumpet and duck jam. A cucumber cream garnish for the oysters was a curiously bland and viscous cream and a mis-hit, texturally speaking. Desserts too were creative and beautiful to look at but are the least evolved items on the menu. The cocktail game at Fleur is probably the best in a Perth restaurant right now. It can be try-hard but, if classics like martinis and negronis are your thing, Fleur’s mix miester, Patrick Carpenter, shakes and stirs some of the best drinks in town. His inventiveness and passion for native herbs, tincture making, pickling, syrup making and curing ingredients is PhD level. Fleur is the result of two of the best brains in WA hospitality, The Royal Hotel owner John Parker and culinary savant, Chase Weber. But, watching this brigade cook, it’s certainly no one-man band. Brilliant. Superb. Fleur The Royal Hotel, corner Wellington and William streets, Perth 9322 1023 | theroyalhotelperth.com.au open Tuesday, 5pm-late; Wednesday-Friday, noon-3pm; Saturday, 5pm-late prices appetisers / small plates… $7-$32 larger… $35-$78 sides / extras… $12-$21 the buzz Casual cool. Epic cookery. Inventive yet comforting. Cocktail service is best-in-breed. 16/20