Ocha is one of our favorite restaurants. Whenever we are in Melbourne, we’ll always have dinner there. It’s always packed so reservation in advance especially if coming on a weekend is a must.

If you’re after true blue japanese, this may not be the place because they serve items like antipasto, calamari on rocket, beef teriyaki on sautéed vegetables, oysters with fancy sauces other than ponzu, and many more fusion dishes.

Our usual dishes comprise of the antipasto, oysters with vinaigrette, miso minced chicken eggplant, calamari with rocket, teriyaki beef with vegetables. There was also a Patagonian tooth fish/ orange roughy marinated in miso dish but they took it off as the fish was endangered.

The new dishes we ordered were assorted sushis and sashimi, and zucchini flower tempura.

All were delicious and the quality still great as always.

For the antipasto, there were 8 different dishes:
1. Miso marinated grilled chicken ribs
2. Grilled periwinkle
3. Shaved mushroom lightly grilled
4. Stewed tuna chunks
5. Stuffed shiitake mushrooms
6. Deep fried prawns
7. Gingko nuts
8. Quail eggs in dashi stock

Oysters were fresh and creamy

Sashimi and sushis which were very good consisted of:
1. Sashimi – salmon, tuna, tuna belly (ootoro), scallops, kingfish
2. Unagi – grilled eel sushi
3. Grilled swordfish sushi
4. Tuna belly sushi
5. Salmon with pink lady mayo sushi
6. Scampi and foie gras shavings sushi

Then the rest of the dishes:

Usually we’d have their sticky date pudding (which they may now call sticky toffee pudding) which is also very good but we were stuffed after the food and 2 bottles of wine…
Ocha