USHIDOKI WAGYU KAISEKI
#01-01, 57 Tras Street, S(078996) T 6221-6379
At Ushidoki Wagyu Kaiseki, everything about the cooking embodies the tenet that Japanese dining in Singapore is as refined as in Japan – so long as you have the right ingredients; here, it’s premium Ozaki wagyu from Japan’s Miyazaki prefecture. It certainly helps that in parlaying his philosophy of head-to-tail cooking onto the plate, executive chef Hirohashi Nobuaki cleaves close to the Japanese concept of mottainai – waste nothing. This might explain the tender tiles of beef tongue simmered in a beef consomme with a touch of yuzu, or roasted slivers of lung flavoured with sweet miso, or even the nuggets of oyster wrapped in carpaccio. In a shallow pan, Nobuaki keeps the maison’s sukiyaki sauce on a barely trembling simmer. The mother sauce was started one and a half year’s ago when the restaurant opened – its extraordinary sweet meaty flavour deepens in intensity every time strips of raw beef are dipped into it to cook for mere seconds before they’re served with a soft-boiled egg and topped with black truffle shavings. The pacing of the kaiseki meal is perfectly judged as Nobuaki shifts gears with, say, a granita of kumquat and tomato, an icy yuzuscented broth of beef tail and ramen, or a handroll stuffed with fatty ribeye. And just to prove that even desserts can manage a bovine note, Nobuaki serves ice cream made from Hokkaido milk paired with a bed of snowy burrata and gula melaka. In a meal already filled with so many nuanced surprises, this quiet homage to his adopted home is probably Nobuaki’s sweetest triumph.