Kobe Jones - Californian Cuisine

The weather has been really humid and hot these past few weeks in Melbourne. Last week, a few of us had set a date to go out and dine somewhere that we’ve never been to and I suggested Kobe Jones or Rockpool.
Everyone had a look at Kobe Jone’s website and voted for Kobe Jones.

Kobe Jones is as chain of Californian Japanese fusion restaurants in Sydney, Bangkok, London and Melbourne. (Funny that they don’t have one in Los Angeles.. hmm…)

From the website, it looked to be ideally situated on the banks of Waterfront City (fancy name for an area in the Docklands) looking out to blue skies and blue waters. I thought, that it would be a great place for a hard day of work. You can feel like you are miles away.

Since booking the restaurant, a friend that I was catching up with for lunch also recommended Kobe Jones. She was going there for Valentine’s Day...

On the day, luckily we had Chris with us. Otherwise, we would have gotten lost in the Docklands. We parked in a large open air car park in Waterfront City and walked out to the boardwalk. There was a large function at The Beach Club and we found Kobe Jones right door next to it.

Arriving at the restaurant, two friends were already there spread out across the waiting couch - frowning. “They don’t have a booking for us” sarcastically declaring that “We won’t be able to get a spot”. The place was not very full… we easily got a table facing the water.

The waiters were very giggly and couldn’t really help us with any recommendations, but pointed us to The Kobe Jones Signature Dishes. We ordered mostly from that and ordered mostly entrees, two rolls and two mains. Standout dishes were the Mushroom Medley Tobanyaki (Oven Baked Assortment of Exotic Mushrooms in a Cream Sauce) and the Number One Special (Crab Salad with Avocado Wrapped in Snapper and Baked with KJ’s Cream Sauce). The Mushroom Medley Tobanyaki was everyone’s favourite, we just couldn’t get enough of it. It was creamy, juicy, sweet and flavoursome. I suspect that there was either Ponzu sauce or Balsamic vinegar in it that surprising enhanced the flavours of the mushrooms.

The dessert menu looked fantastic too, ranging from trifle, pannacotta to more traditional Japanese dishes like Yokan. We couldn’t decide, so we had the Ama Ozen (A Tray of a Sample of Each of the Desserts). The dessert tray came with a mismatch of small ceramic and glass bowls filled with colourful desserts. Resting on one of the bowls were a pair of giant chocolate chopsticks. At first I thought they were real chopsticks for us to use, odd as the desserts were mostly in cream form.

We could eat no more.. and were very satisfied after dessert.

Even better still, Kobe Jones was having a 25% off the total bill for The Entertainment Book members. So it ended up being a very reasonable and delicious meal, under the warm orange sun.

Kobe Jones
Level 1 119/427 Docklands Drive
Waterfront City
Docklands
03 9329 9173
info.mel@kobejones.com.au