Gold Class Daruma

Finding it is the first oddity. You walk into The Grace Hotel on York Street and go up to the first floor, and there is a moment of wondering whether you have the wrong address. The name does not help — it sounds like a cinema.

Ask for the counter. At a table you are served a sequence of dishes; at the counter you watch them being made, and the difference is larger here than at most places. You are close enough to see the knife work.

The food is the reason people come back. Wagyu and tuna, lobster done four ways across a single meal, sashimi that tastes of almost nothing except the fish. Pufferfish if it is on. The cooking is precise rather than showy and it holds up course after course.

It is a small room and it stays quiet, so conversation at your own table is the loudest thing you hear. That suits some evenings and makes others feel slightly exposed.

Each course lands as its own small idea rather than as part of a run, and the ones that stay with you are rarely the ones you expected walking in. The tuna and the wagyu are the obvious high points and the quieter dishes between them hold up.

Courses can arrive faster than you want them to, with little said between them, and on a quiet night it can feel less like an occasion and more like a sequence of very good plates. Sitting at the counter mostly fixes it, because you can see what is coming.

Between courses the room does not fill the silence with anything. Either you find that restful or you do not, and most people know which by the third dish.

By the second or third course you have mostly forgotten you are in the middle of the city, and then you come back down the stairs into York Street and it is immediately loud again.