Minamishima is where you find Melbourne’s best sushi.

Sushi master Koichi Minamishima sources the finest (nigiri) rice and the best fish he can find in Australia and Japan, then fuses them almost magically into compositions of rare beauty.

Among his delicacies, on an ascending scale of exquisiteness, you might be offered garfish with ginger and spring onion. Then whiting made pleasingly bitter by a nettle like herb. Then dory with just enough chilli pepper to tingle the lips.

Chef Minamishima sets the course for your $150 omakase (set menu), opening with a seasonal entree and closing with a (fishtail) broth and dessert, perhaps a sweetened Japanese omelet.

Restaurant manager and sommelier Randolph Cheung has wine to complement and counter your sushi at every turn. Choose sake and you are in for the best time. But this singular establishment — lodged on the ground floor of an apartment block — is greater than the sum of its undeniably beautiful parts.

To dine at Minamishima — preferably at the bar where you can eyeball the chefs — is to enter a zone of Zen-like calm, where there is no fuss, minimal music, almost no utensils, just a black napkin and two chopsticks on a pebble.

Sushi is the star and just when you think it cannot get any better, it does. Scorched flounder wing and sea urchin in blackened soba noodles could be the two best things you taste this year.

Must eat dish: scampi prawn sushi with wasabi