The best seat in an omakase restaurant is undoubtedly at the bar counter, where you can enjoy a culinary show by the head chef. It is an even bigger bonus when they are chattier because who does not like a little bit of banter and humour while they dine? If you’re craving a fine Japanese meal with good conversation, these two chefs will win you over with their impressive culinary skills and charming personalities.
Sushi Sato
6B Dempsey Rd | Tel: 8380 3830
No stranger to Singapore, chef Yuji Sato worked eight years as the sous chef at highly-acclaimed Hashida before setting out on his own in 2021. He now helms namesake restaurant Sushi Sato — by Archetype Food — a quaint ryokan-inspired hideaway in Dempsey, complete with a zen bonzai garden.
Hailing from Hokkaido with over 30 years of sushi-making experience, Sato brings a cuisine guided by the concept of kokoro (which translates to “heart, spirit and wisdom”). Every exquisite dish, finely crafted with his immaculate knife skills, expresses his sincerity and wish to bring happiness to all his customers.
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He anchors the strong-scented hinoki counter like he is in his private kitchen, with true warmth and bubbly banter. After slicing each piece of seafood with equal parts precision and heart, he serves it to the diner with a wide smile. He introduces the dishes in his best English, but if you need more explanation of ingredients or cooking techniques, his Singaporean sous chef and attentive service staff are eager to help.
Dining with Sato is always interesting as he may choose to punctuate the sushi course with small dishes such as grilled fish or sashimi in between. For dinner, I tried the Omakase menu ($380 per person), which includes a seasonal hassun, chawanmushi, sashimi, various cooked dishes, soup, a rice dish, and about 10 pieces of sushi and a handroll. If you want to splurge, the Kokoro ($480) and Kiwami ($580) menus include additional hot dishes and premium ingredients like abalone, hairy crab and caviar. There are also lunch menus available from $220.
For his summer menu, Sato pairs premium seafood like Hokkaido uni, black throat sea perch and kinmedai with delicious daikon, yams, water plants and flowers of the season. Because it is summer, many cooked dishes also carry refreshing citrusy yuzu-infused marinades and seasoning, with pickled ginger and white radish.
His shari is also a thing of beauty, featuring three distinct Japanese red vinegar combined with specially selected Tsuyahime rice from the Yamagata Prefecture, which is just the right amount of sticky with a firm bite.
The hot dishes are equally stellar, from the baby tuna smoked and seared on the binchotan to the simmered black throat sea perch served with daikon and burdock root and tamago made from a mousse of eggs, scallop, prawn and codfish.
Dining here promises a stellar show of knife acrobatics. The fluidity with which Sato wields his sushi knife is hypnotic, especially when trimming octopus tentacles quickly but delicately to form perfectly round nodules. He even brings a piece of Ishigaki clam to “life” with the friendly whack of a palm to make it curl upwards.
When the course ends, Sato will come over to let you know and ask if you are satisfied with your meal — it seems that he will happily feed you more if you dare ask. I thought my dinner was about three sushi too much, but I didn’t see anyone complaining!
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Kagayaki by Ishigaki Yoshida
27 Keong Saik Road | Tel: 9017 7631
One of Singapore’s few restaurants offering a teppanyaki omakase experience, Kagayaki is the local offshoot of Ishigaki Yoshida in Tokyo. Chef Junichi Yoshida, who helms the Tokyo restaurant, holds the distinction of founding the first chef-owned teppanyaki establishment to be awarded a Michelin star in 2015.
In Singapore, Kagayaki, which refers to “brilliance” in Japanese, is led by head chef Nobuyasu Kamiko, who has over 30 years of experience, 15 of which were spent working as a teppanyaki chef. He trained for six months under chef Yoshida in the namesake’s Tokyo restaurant before he came here to open Singapore’s outpost. He’s extremely friendly and speaks surprisingly well, probably honed from his years at Conrad Tokyo.
The best seat in the house is at the 18-seater teppan counter, where diners can watch Kamiko in action as he deftly prepares their course meal. And unlike the noisy teppanyaki show of clanging cutlery that we’re accustomed to, you hardly hear a peep from Kamiko when he’s slicing the ingredients on the hotplate, nor will you walk out of the restaurant smelling like Korean barbecue.
The star here is the Masuda Kagayaki Beef, prized for being translucent and delicate. The premium female cattle are raised in Masuda Farm, located in Gunma prefecture, and fed a special feed of boiled-pressed barley that is steamed twice for six months. This laborious method of feeding the cattle with cooked food is a rarity even among premium beef farms in Japan and transforms the lipids in their meat. Kagayaki has exclusive rights to the breed in Southeast Asia and is the only restaurant in the region to use Masuda beef.
This beef is the highlight of the eight-course Kagayaki Menu ($380++ per person) and appears in the seasonal Hassun, the Ultimate Crispy Yaki Steak, and fluffy Beef Garlic Fried Rice. I watched as Kamiko gently slow-cooked the Masuda beef on low heat on the teppan and then seared it over an oak binchotan to give it that nice char.
Another dish to look forward to is Scrambled Eggs with Uni, a signature of Yoshida’s. Premium Japanese eggs are delicately whipped and cooked to a soft, milky texture with a generous amount of uni folded into them. It is topped with more uni for the ultimate scrambled egg experience and served with buttered homemade brioche.
I also enjoyed the seasonal seafood dishes like the wild-caught Hokkaido scallops, grilled on the teppan with three mushrooms in a herb butter sauce. The dish is topped with a foam of scallops and asari clam cream and served with some garlic puree on the side to elevate it. Another highlight was the juicy amadai from Yamaguchi Prefecture, lightly grilled with scales intact and crispy and served over a bed of wasabi beurre blanc.
Ending the well-balanced meal was super soft warabi mochi prepared on the spot. It came with house-made matcha ice cream using green tea from Shizuoka prefecture and a serving of Okinawa black sugar syrup.
Dining at Kagayaki was a pure delight for the senses. I love how clean and simple the plating was, where every garnish worked to accentuate the dish’s flavours rather than merely add aesthetic value. Kamiko’s charm and humorous one-liner jokes are another reason for a repeat visit.
