For a certain type of food fan, a special reverence is attached to the simple pleasure of raw fish on rice. You know the kind of person I am talking about – the one who watches the slightly pretentious food documentaries on Netflix instead of watching Narcos and Breaking Bad, and then crows about it at social events. This is not a bad thing. I have been, and sometimes am, that person, as my friends will be at pains to point out at this stage.
The problem is, as much as I enjoy watching food porn like everyone else, I am not a great lover of fine dining restaurants. It’s all a little pretentious, uncomfortable, reverential and (let’s be honest) expensive. You feel cheated if you don’t come out feeling like your mouth just won the taste lottery.
For this reason, I tend to avoid fine dining restaurants unless someone else is paying or I really want something I can’t get anywhere else. Really good fish and rice falls into the latter category which means that, whilst you can admittedly scratch the itch pretty well at lots of mid-range sushi restaurants, you’re never going to be fully sated until you have splashed the cash at a top sushi joint. Again, you will already know the kind of place I am talking about. Michelin starred, a blond wood bar with a dozen or so seats, a few solemn Japanese chefs unhurriedly sliding perfect cuts of fish onto rice and then onto the counter in front of you at regular intervals for you to eat there and then with your hands, and all around the restaurant a cathedral like tranquillity.
It was this vision of uncluttered, simple pleasure that brought me to Shinji by Kanaseka in the first place. I was staying with friends in Singapore and, having a weekday lunchtime to myself, thought I would enjoy a special meal to reflect on the year gone by and the year ahead. Think of it as a special kind of mindfulness - one which doesn’t involve you falling asleep in a chair and waking up with a loud grunt and spit running down the side of your face.
I arrived in rather un-zen like fashion, carrying a bag of meat. Being Singapore, this meat was also very quickly decomposing, which meant I gave the waitress a mental gold star for offering to put it in the fridge while I ate. The meat incident behind us, I was guided to my seat at the blond wood bar with a dozen or so other diners (I told you so) and, partly out of gratitude and party out of greed, plumped for the balls-out, most expensive, lunchtime omakase set.
Everything was set up pretty nicely for my mindfulness session as the dishes started to slowly roll their way out. Some beautifully fresh and sweet uni here, a few slivers of Japanese tomato there, some totally unbelievable squid, which totally changed my opinion on the subject. At this stage, I was pretty confident that this whole food-based mindfulness thing was working quite well, and was also delighted that I had found a less tragic way of saying “I had lunch on my own in a posh restaurant”.
My karma was, however, ruined by an obnoxious male Singaporean banker and a prospective female employee who were seated next to me somewhere between my slices of normal, medium and fatty tuna. A friend once told me a joke about meeting guys on dates which goes along the lines of: “You know how you know someone went to [Yale][Harvard][Oxford][Cambridge] when you meet them? They will tell you within the first 15 minutes of meeting them and before they have asked a question about you”. This guy went to Harvard. The girl, probably already suitably impressed by the choice of location for a final interview, was from China and said about 12 words all meal, which was actually quite annoying in itself, as what she did have to say was eminently less irritable than her dining companion.
The rest of the meal was slightly marred by this intrusion into my headspace although, in fairness, the food was consistently pretty good. The aged tuna, marinated briefly in soy sauce, proved that fresh fish isn’t necessarily the tastiest, and any restaurant which provides uni by the spoonful on more than one occasion is definitely worthy of praise. There were a couple of mis-steps though – one of the chilled starters and the desert came out fridge cold (bowl and all), which is fine for mass catering, but a little off when you are handing over a good chunk of your weekly wage and are expecting the full flavour of ingredients served at the appropriate temperature.
All in all, a solid choice if you like posh sushi, but probably not a great deal different from the other high-end sushi joints catering for the moneyed banker crowd in busy Asian cities. The final bill came in at about SG$250, which also means that I won’t be rushing back. Well, at least not until I watch the next Japan-centric food-based based documentary on Netflix.