Astral Weeks’ intimate restaurant Ah Um has officially opened

Normally, if we heard a restaurant described as a “dead room”… Well, we’d be concerned, to say the least.

After all, isn’t the soundtrack to a successful restaurant an overwhelming cacophony of cutlery, chatter, and the bartender’s current favourite “Chill Restaurant Vibes Upbeat” Spotify playlist?

But when we walk into Ah Um, Astral Weeks‘ intimate new 25-seat restaurant tucked away at the rear of the Northbridge listening bar, we’re met with an almost transcendently calm, supremely quiet, very dead room.

(The name, incidentally, has been taken from Charles Mingus’ seminal 1959 jazz album: Mingus Ah Um.)

In the acoustic sense, a dead room is one with no reverberation – which in the wrong hands, can be uncomfortably quiet, unless you have a top-of-the-line hi-fi set up. Luckily, Astral Weeks (and by extension, Ah Um) aren’t playing around when it comes to sound – something that was made abundantly clear when Sean O’Neill hit play on the evening’s curated playlist, amplified through the space with a crisp, meticulous clarity.

Like Astral Weeks, Ah Um’s system has been custom built by Sydney-based outfit Translate Sound.

“I didn’t want to put pressure on the space sounding really good because I wasn’t sure how it was going to sound until everything was in there,” explains Sean, one of the collective of owners behind Ah Um and Astral Weeks.

(For the audiophiles, thanks to the folks at Translate Sound: “An updated broadband 2-way system with extremely smooth in room average response of +-1.5db from target response, between 60hz and 12khz (29hz 0db to 14khz -6db in room response) with especially tight transient response from 850hz upwards thanks to the non-resonant nitride coated high frequency diaphragm. All coming together with assistance from linear phase filtering for even off-axis system response.”)

“Like, I went over to Sydney to listen to them, but they built new ones for the for this place – and I wasn’t listening to them in this space, I was listening to them in someone’s lounge room. So it’s very hard to know – and I didn’t want to put too much pressure with us saying to people ‘We’re building another listening bar, but it’s also a restaurant.’”

In spite of Sean’s modest hedging, the acoustic experience at Ah Um is – at least in our experience – a singular one.

“It’s almost as though this place might become a truer version of the listening bar, but it’s a restaurant: just because we do have that option of a controlled environment. My vision of Astral was like, ‘It’s a listening bar, and we’re going to be strict on this and this…’, but then it just became very popular – and as a bar owner, you have to embrace being busy and popular because you just have too many bills.”

So while a visit to Astral Weeks on a quiet weeknight still scratches the audiophile itch, on Fridays and Saturdays it transforms into a more bustling, familiar interpretation of a bar in the middle of Northbridge.

It’s through the hustle and bustle of Astral Weeks that people will enter Ah Um, the spaces divided by a sliding door that’s surprisingly effective at insulating the tranquil restaurant from the noise of the bar.

“I think it’s a pretty cool or intense experience when you walk in and you notice how different the mood or atmosphere is, especially if Astral is busy and you come into this calming, quiet environment. But then when you leave and exit the restaurant back into Astral as well… It’s like, you kind of remember where you are located again in Northbridge in a way. It’s like, ‘Oh, I forgot where we were!‘”

“There’s the music and the space, and the atmosphere, and the music – and the sound is really a part of that whole experience,” Sean continues.

“It’s not just about the food or the drinks or the service – I don’t know very many restaurants in Perth that are really taking sound and music seriously, in terms of how is it affecting the atmosphere, and is someone actually thinking about it on shift and during service? Or is it just up to whoever’s on staff and then they’re going to be busy and they forget, or the confident person with bad taste puts something on and then everyone’s fucked!“

“You just want everything to make sense in the room – you know, there’s nothing worse than going to eat out at a restaurant and you’re just like ‘Why are they playing this? Who thought this would be a good idea?!’”

“I think people can handle some quiet, calming music. It doesn’t have to be up and a party. Why does it have to feel like a party when everyone’s seated in a small room? You know what I mean? Trying to have a conversation? Why does it have to feel like it’s this loud, massive party popping off?”

Fittingly, the restaurant is soundtracked exclusively by AW Radio: the bar’s own digital radio station curated by musicians all over the globe, which includes long playlists created especially for the dining room. This also means you can listen at home – although we can’t say the sonic experience of listening on a pair of AirPods quite matches the custom hi-fi set up in the restaurant…

Similarly, there’s no Branden Scott in our kitchens at home. Scott spent almost three years in the kitchen at Wines of While as co-head chef alongside Jack Botha, and will bring his seasonal, pared-back approach to Ah Um’s menu.

“I’ve got enough faith in Brandon that I don’t tell him what to do in terms of food, he just does it,” Sean tells us.

“And then it’ll depend on produce and season, for example, what seafood is very good this week rather than ‘We want this on the menu’. So I think that’s how it’ll always be run – which makes life difficult in terms of knowing what’s on the menu!” he laughs.

Stylistically, the menu is most similarly aligned with new-wave New York wine bars – as Sean tells us, spots like Wildair, Bar Contra and The Four Horsemen. When we visited, the menu included tuna crudo with blood orange, beef tartare and mushroom atop a satisfying hunk of sourdough, sirloin with curry leaf and market fish with champagne veloute – although those are all liable to change at a moment’s notice. It’s a restrained, modern approach to cooking in which cuisine or geography comes secondary to produce.

Somehow, the choice of sake to specialise in seems fitting – although there’s not a particularly Japanese lilt to the menu, it feels somehow philosophically in line with Ah Um’s approach. Their limited selection is sourced via distributors Black Market – also owners of Sydney listening bar ANTE.

“They’ve got the nicest sake – they’re definitely selling the nicest sake, I think, in Australia. There’s six selections of sake from them, and then we have a full wine list which is mainly on the natural side of things but nothing too wild, all pretty accessible. Mainly European, a few things local, and from Adelaide Hills as well. A nice selection of beers, and the classic cocktails: martinis and negronis sort of thing. And we’ll still have the classic Astral drinks like the Yuzu Highballs.”

“Keeping it similar to Astral in the sense that the drinks menu is nice and concise and minimalist.”

“I always thought: no matter what, the music element was going to be important, and then the hi-fi side was also going to be important. And between a few of the owners, we’ve always loved going out to eat… A small restaurant made sense as the next step more than anything else.”

“I think what we’ve done here is essentially created a bit of a hidden sanctuary within the Astral, and Astral is like a bit of a sanctuary from the craziness of Northbridge.”

Ah Um is located at Shop 12/60–66 Roe Street, Northbridge (Enter via Astral Weeks Bar).

All images: Sally Hall / Perth is OK!