Star Power
With its links to a renowned sushi restaurant in Hong Kong and top-quality ingredients flown in daily from Tokyo, dining at Shoukouwa feeds you well and makes for a memorable experience, writes Chong Seow Wei
houkouwa’s claim to fame is its connection with Sushi Shikon, the three Michelin-starred fine dining restaurant at The Mercer hotel in Hong Kong. Shikon’s co-founder, Japanese cuisine specialist Hanachiyo, partners the Emmanuel Stroobant Group to open the 14-seater sushi restaurant (tel: 6423 9939) at One Fullerton. This means, depending on the season, you can find the acclaimed establishment’s signatures such as the supple awabi (abalone) sushi topped with its own rich liver sauce, on Shoukouwa’s omakase-only menu. Served by chef Masakazu Ishibashi, one of three trained sushi chefs helming the restaurant, our tasting menu comprises selected dishes from both its 16-course lunch and 20- and 23-course dinner menus. The 35-year-old chef comes from a family of sushi masters. From age 10, he started helping out at his father’s restaurant in their hometown in the Tochigi prefecture, north of Tokyo. He served his first customer six years later and today, makes sushi and non-sushi dishes with skill and aplomb. He starts us off with a light and tangy bonito soup with crunchy water lily bulbs, sweet tiger prawns and cape gooseberries. The dish awakens the taste buds and readies us for the next course: a sweet and slightly oily slice of grilled kuromutsu (Japanese black-