Litl x Litl is a brand new, closet-sized Japanese eatery on Swanbourne’s cappuccino strip with space for just six.

It may be small on space, but it’s big on taste – perhaps just not the traditional Japanese flavours you’d expect. Litl x Litl is all about mixing the old with the new, and Chef and owner Adam McMahon has given his Japanese food a little Aussie inventiveness.

The sushi, for example, comes in a whole range of colours depending on which rice you’re after. Besides traditional white rice, there’s brown rice (for the GI-conscious), and rice infused with things like beetroot, carrot and ginger. We’re pretty sure no Tokyoite has ever tasted a beetroot rice, prawn, cucumber and coriander mayo sushi roll before. We reckon they’d probably laugh at it… and then love it.

The salads have gotten the Japanese-Australian fusion treatment as well. The wackiest of them all is the marinated seaweed, beetroot, Persian feta. It’s sweet, salty and slippery. And delicious.

But who’d order anything cold when it’s so frigid out? Litl x Litl’s hot food includes Japanese fish curry, pork belly in broth, tofu and edamame and miso soup with brown rice, black lentils and prawns topped with lemon yogurt.

There’s a lot to love about this little place.

Where: 123b Claremont Crescent, Swanbourne
Hours: Mon-Fri 10:30am – 4:30pm
Details: litlxlitl.com.au/index.htm