Toku Toku

Deep-fried Mars Bars aren't just a hangover from the 1990s. Oh no. They're a tempura reality of new Glebe izakaya Toku Toku. This eat house/drink house occupies an old terrace, right next door to Glebe Public School where the markets are held every Saturday. It's certainly a growth area, with the likes of Wedge Espresso opening soon down this end of Glebe Point Road, joining the general weekend mayhem of the popular Clipper Café. If you head down to Toku Toku on a Sunday afternoon be prepared for the inescapable house beats pumping from every speaker, outside and in. It can be a little traumatic if you've had a big one the night before. However, you will be rewarded with Asahi on tap, plenty of choice on the sake front and prawn nasu denkaku ($14). Here, the dish translates to mini rounds of eggplant covered in sweet soy, each little piece topped with a grilled butterflied prawn. Chicken karage ($15) is served with a kimchi mayo (the owners of Toku Toku are Korean) and has that weird kind of smooth batter skin, rather than the crunchy bits of crumbiness you might be used to. The hilariously named ‘hand made premium sausage' ($12) is slices of thin, glistening, sweet pork sausage – it'd be great on a Japanese-style hotdog. Pork belly ssam ($18), that staple of Korean barbecue joints everywhere, is thinly sliced-then-grilled belly which you then wrap in lettuce leaves and dip in ssam jang - a thick, spicy sauce of fermented chilli and soybean paste. And, of course, there's the tempura Mars Bar ($7), served in three little bites. The outside is battered and the inside is all malty and melty. It's like eating a hot chip with a chocolate chaser, and pretty damned tasty.