Koko

This is my favorite place for teppanyaki or even just a sit down meal at a quite table.
The banquets are great for first timers but ordering off the menu and watching it being cooked in front of you is always a pleasure.
The staff are very friendly and the chef’s are always quick with a joke or two.
The atmosphere is fantastic. It almost feels like you’re in a Japanese emperor’s castle with gigantic wooden beams looming over your head.
I asked for a window seat last time i went and they happily obliged.
Looking over the yarra river and the cbd with the flames going off along the promenade just added to the atmosphere.
I’ve never booked a private room there but that is next on the list of things to do there.
The price is as expected for an inner city restaurant, a five star restaurant especially.
Average price is around $ 120 a person (entrée, main, dessert and drinks) but well worth it for the experience and quality of food.

To truly experience Koko you absolutely must book a private room. You’ll be assigned a teppanyaki chef that will proceed to cook everything to perfection, while the wait staff and restaurant manager treat you like royalty. It can be pretty expensive but is definitely worthwhile. One of my favourite places to celebrate with good company. I recommend the «Kaze» banquet with the Wagu steak. Amazing.

Firstly, I have a guilty secret! I love watching people prepare my food! Watching the care and attention that people put into their chosen skill/​craft/​profession so Teppenyaki and Sushi bar are right up my ally!
Koko have two different options, a ‘normal’ à la carte menu and of course, a Teppanyaki. If you are going to play it safe and go the normal option… then go for lunch or when it is quiet so that you don’t feel tempted to stare at all the cool people with their own personal chef (or food flying around)
How should you tackle your Teppanyaki experience? walk in, sit down. Order a beer (or other beverage but a nice cold beer is a good start) and pick one of the four banquet options. Trust me! these are great value for money and give you a tour of what they have to offer. it puts control in the hands of your chef and allows you to sit back and enjoy the ride!
The food is amazing, the chefs are talented and the staff are very attentive. In fact, just an accidental nod or turning your head to look around at the great décor can bring an scurry of staff to wait on your whims!
Now, it is not cheap but good Teppanyaki never is. So take your credit card and your friends and have a great night out!

i generally try a Teppenyaki place every 2 years because it is $$$$ and probably best saved for special occasions and so far koko is one of the better ones i’ve been to in Australia.
Koko started off so great with very lovely friendly attentive service. We shared a bottle of plum wine Choya Umesha which was delish and very easy to drink.
Followed by divine tataki before we began our number 2 banquet. Aside from the bland fried rice everything else, the seafood, the beef, the vegetables, prawn head chips was cooked deliciously. The sashimi was melt in your mouth and the tiny seaweed and normal salad were great palette refreshers.
Unfortunately we were there towards closing time and they were too busy closing everyone down and need a friendly reminder about our dessert.
I’ll be back again i’m sure because everything was at least good… just not blow your mind amazing.

Koko is flamboyant but brilliant. I mean teppanyaki is all always fun, different and interesting. Now I say flamboyant because these guys love to impress from the way they cook the food to serving it, there’s nothing normal about it.
I am a huge fan of Japanese food actually Asian food in general gets me excited. So I have to say I love most the food served in the banquet we indulged in! Some of the stand outs for me though, was the miso soup and sashimi. The soup was rich and full of flavour a perfect way to start the banquet. The sashimi was impressive with huge selection to try. The salmon was divine and as boring as it may sound the tune was beautiful too! The cooking is a real performance but quality is never compromised. The fried rice and steak were immaculate and completed the banquet beautifully. It’s classy, quirky, fun and most definitely delicious!

As a huge fan of Japanese cuisine, I’m on a constant quest to seek out any and all trusty Japanese food in Melbourne, and I’m willing to pay up for it.
That’s the attitude I brought with me on my first visit to Koko last month, after having it on my to-​eat list for many, many years, and I wasn’t disappointed. As another reviewer stated, it won’t blow your mind with extreme creativity, but it delivers on consistency and quality. And in my view, those two things are tough enough asks for many Melbourne «Japanese» restaurants!
Freshness is another strength at Koko — I ordered a strawberry mocktail, and I watched a waiter bring a box of fresh strawberries over to the bar, where my mocktail was made and promptly served.
Fan of Japanese cuisine — and a vegetarian? Yep that’s me, so I appreciate that every season, Koko keeps at least some vegetarian options on the menu. The «five kinds of vegetarian sushi» was delicious. My two dining companions were non-​vegetarians, and they also enjoyed their choices, which included tuna and beef dishes. The upside to being a vegetarian diner at Koko is that due to their pricing on vegetarian options, you can definitely have a good meal for a fair bit less money than your omnivorous counterparts.
We didn’t get around to trying dessert, but I perused the menu and it has a very good number of choices. There are things like chestnut tarts, ice cream, fruit parfaits, mochi and so on.
The setting is quiet, elegant, modern… and did I mention that awesome pond in the middle of the restaurant? Service is smooth and efficient.
Conclusion: Koko is not «cheap» and not avant-​garde by any means, but if you’re dying for a trusty, fresh, clean well-​executed Japanese meal, then in my opinion it is one of the better choices in this city.
Side note: I’m going again tomorrow so I can finally try the dessert!

After a very calorie intensive week spent at Virginia Plain, Pei Modern and Rosetta, I thought I would hunt down some «healthy» sushi and sashimi and try a place that has been on my list for quite a while, the amusingly named Koko located on the 3^rd level of Crown Casino in Southbank.
A warm welcome was had upon entering Koko. Looking around you will find teppanyaki tables, other tables reserved for a la carte dining along the glass wall that overlooks the Southbank Promenade and the beautiful (sic) Yarra River and a small sushi bar that can seat six people. We choose the sushi bar and were immediately seated and offered water and the wine list.
The amount of fish on offer was not huge but unlike other sushi bars, like at Sake, Koko doesn’t give the false impression of having a tremendous variety of fish by stacking it up in repeating intervals down the refrigerated display cocoon. I informed the chef that were we not wanting to make many decisions so we left the choices with him. The usual sashimi suspects were served which included tuna, salmon, kingfish and octopus which were all as you would expect. The highlight for the first round of food was the spicy scallop roll. It was full of flavour but highlighted by the horseradish component of the wasabi as they did not use true «real» wasabi, but the bastardised version that is primarily horseradish. A twitter follower also highlighted this to me — it is queer that they offer such a premium product but then have fake wasabi to accompany it.
To finish off my meal, I ordered sea urchin (Uni) and it was beautiful. I got talking with the chef and told him that I am usually sullen whilst enjoying sushi as Toro (the fatty underbelly of tuna) is rarely available. He said that they had some available and not having enjoyed any for over a year, it left me on a high of anticipation. I finished my meal with Toro after happily devouring my Uni with the sake however I was bemused because the Toro had been previously frozen. The chef verified this. Although it was beautiful, it was nothing like what I previously had at Azuma in Sydney which was freshly procured and served the day that it had arrived.
The restaurant is beautiful and the service was very regimented and professional. There is always someone lurking in the area waiting for a glance from you so that an order can be taken or in our case, dishes replaced, chopsticks returned to their default resting position and our sake glasses refreshed with what seemed like a never-​ending bottle on the day that I visited.
What I found interesting is that in the middle of the restaurant is a pond. I asked the very affable sushi chef if anyone ever has fallen in it. He did say a few drunks had in the past and it makes for good entertainment later in the evening. That certainly would beat the cabaret experience at Dracula’s and it would be something that I would return to see.
Strangely when I commenced writing this, I started thinking of the old Madonna song «Frozen» when I first thought about Koko. It is probably not the best association as I am not a Madonna fan and it isn’t good to reference perhaps my favourite cut of fish being served defrosted or even the fact that such delicate flavours are complimented with fake wasabi. I thought about this occasionally over the last three days and it made me angry actually because I really wanted to have a «local» sushi bar to stop around at and I really wanted Koko to be the place. Sadly it will not be.

Always good. Been here a few times now and always had the teppenyaki. Very good staff and very good food, you can’t go wrong

Great! Been here a couple of times now and have always been impressed with their service and good quality sashimi. Highlight of the teppenyaki was definitely the seafood portion. So good!

So many high end Japanese restaurants in Melbourne, so little time…
If you are looking for a quiet dining experience in Crown, then head to Koko which is usually surpassed by the throngs of Casino visitors and tourists, predominantly because it is away from the main thoroughfares and riverfront.
Koko offers a modern Japanese décor, and the usual Sushi and A La Carte menu’s, plus a few teppenyaki tables to boot. Both the restaurant and the food are beautifully presented, and the Sushi is delicious!
The service staff were excellent too, and were happy to talk us through the menu.
Is Koko super original? No. But they do Japanese very, very well. And I love their Japanese water garden.

KoKo is a high-​end Japanese dinning experience tucked away in the depths of Crown away from all the other popular restaurants/​places.
When you enter, you’ll notice the dimly lit space has a large pond in the middle with fairy lights and stepping-​stones. There are also a few teppanyaki tables here with very experienced and entertaining chefs.
The food here is exceptional, you can expect a large variety on the menu. I would suggest ordering the crispy salmon skin sushi and steamed egg soup.
KoKo also offers private dining rooms in a tradition style layout. The entire restaurant feels intimate and a world away from the daily grind. It’s a fantastic dining experience, and I would highly recommended it to those who enjoy splurging on quality food.

Here’s the thing about Koko. I can’t think of much wrong with it. As far as teppanyaki and Japanese restaurants go, it’s perfectly fine. It has a nice view and the staff are gracious.
On the other hand, I can’t think of much that I love about it either (except their sparkling saki… OHMYFREAKINGGOODNESS that stuff is awesome).
There are definitely better Japanese restaurants, better sushi options and superior teppanyaki experiences to be had.
But I’d go back for that bubbly saki anytime.