3 December 2021

The veil is lifted: Kokomo's reopens as Wilma

| Max O'Driscoll
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James Viles and Brendan Hill

Culinary Director of HARVAC James Viles and Head Chef Brendan Hill at ‘Wilma’. Photo: Ashley St George.

It’s official! Kokomo’s in Civic will reopen as Wilma for the first time tonight (3 December).

Described as a “progressive Asian barbeque restaurant”, Wilma is the latest project of HARVAC, Peter and Michael Harrington’s parent company for their venues Akiba, Sage Dining Rooms and Loquita.

Culinary director of HARVAC James Viles and head chef Brendan Hill will be fronting Wilma, with James proclaiming the pair are “pumped” to introduce the venue.

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Mr Viles expects their diverse menu to become a real crowd-pleaser.

“Brendan’s put together a menu with a very primitive cooking technique, back to basics and cooking a lot over coals. Probably 80 per cent of the menu cooked directly over coals in a lot of different formats. From wood ovens to konro grills to hot smoking as well, and all with native Australian timbers,” James said.

“The flavour profiles are more along the lines of that Central Asia, China/Cantonese kind of thing, and it’s a large menu. It’s a large share format, casual-style menu with a live raw bar as well.”

The live raw bar will have chefs slicing sashimi and shucking oysters as diners watch on.

Dining room

The venue will return with a sleek look. Photo: Ashley St George.

While this venue will be more of a restaurant than a bar, The Pearl will also be situated inside Wilma and will feature Asian-inspired cocktails such as an Osaka Old Fashioned and Lychee Dragonfruit Margarita, along with a bar menu featuring scallop prawn tartare, snag sanga and Wilma’s Emperor Tarts.

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The 200-plus capacity restaurant has an enormous menu that they say is best experienced through one of the two banquet options.

To book, view the menu or make an enquiry, visit Wilma BBQ.

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Go Toby. You get the award for most woke reader but I’m disappointed u didn’t use “privilege” in yr comments.

Toby Van Der Zwart10:50 am 03 Dec 21

I’m a concerned about white people calling asian cooking methods primitive, and i am extremely confused as to how central asian and cantonese food can be lumped together as ‘that kind of thing’. It’s not like we have a shortage of good, real asian food in canberra anyway. Interesting to see how this will go…

They’re not calling asian cooking methods primitive.
They are saying they will utilise primitive cooking methods.
It’s just jumping on the current coals/smoked bbq bandwagon anyway.

And I wondered why Sage had gone downhill recently. They’ve been bought out by these guys and the chef has moved on.

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