Came with a few friends because we wanted Japanese food in Soho area, and this one happened to have a 15% discount with DBS or BEA, with a free salmon sashimi, so the cash-strapped party of 5 went to try it out.
There were only another table aside from us, and during one point a lone western lady dined briefly on a diet of sushi. The decor is not too bad, beige and light coloured, tables nicely spaced apart. The lighting was a bit on the dark side though.
We ordered a sashimi set ($260) and a sushi set ($160) which we thought were decently priced for the quality of food, and also some fatty tuna rolls, avocado and eel rolls, and salmon uni rolls. The presentation was good, except that one of the rolls they gave us included the end cut, which i think is not supposed to be served in proper restaurants (as there is mostly rice and no fillings)... The wasabi was served in a shell, the sashimi was carved artfully, and all was good except ... that I couldn't taste anything!? The fish was fresh, so there wasn't that fishy stale odour, but then again i can't taste much of the real flavour either... everything just tasted... the same. I popped sushi after sashimi, roll after roll, still everything tasted rather bland. I even did the unthinkable - dip my entire piece of sashimi/sushi into wasabi-saturated soy sauce, still it didn't taste of anything (i couldn't even taste the wasabi). OK, you say, maybe I have messed up my taste buds with spicy thai and indian curry... but i've never had this strange experience in other japanese places....
As for the cooked stuff, we ordered rack of lamb, 2 flavours of chicken cartilage "soft bone", ox tongue, cold inaniwa udon, tempura (prawn and pumpkin) and foie gras fried rice, except they forgot our order of fried rice. The rack of lamb didn't taste very lamb-y, but the ox tongue was too salty, everything else was decently mediocre.
When we were about to get the bill they told us that we could have had the salmon sashimi which we forgot to "remind" them, so instead they gave us red bean, green tea or coffee icecream instead. I have to say, the green tea ice cream was the most "environmentally-looking coloured green" food i've ever seen... hope it's not malachite green or something...
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