Dinner at Wahiro

E took me out for dinner last night to celebrate my birthday. We decided to spend it at Wahiro, a tiny but very good restaurant in Katong Mall that always seems to be packed to the gills with Japanese clientele, and has received many rave reviews. We ate there once before for lunch, and had a good impression of the food, so it was timely for a return there for dinner this time round.

We took the Kaiseki menu - 8 small and exquisite dishes priced at $68 per pax. Kaiseki menus change according to the seasons, as Japanese chefs prepare the food using what is fresh and in season at that time. So what we ate would be the Winter Kaiseki (I think). N.B. As I was writing this post I checked the Wahiro website and they’ve already changed the kaiseki menu, which looks totally yums too.

We started off with an absolutely marvellous starter of Hotate (raw scallop) salad. The scallops were just so unimaginably sweet, juicy and tender that both of us were in ecstasies about what was to come next. The next course, a clear soup with "dumplings" of minced prawn / shitake mushroom and lotus root was oddly "Chinese tasting" and not really spectacular. Third dish - assorted sashimi of tuna and two other types of fish that we couldn't identify. As expected, it was good, fresh and sweet. I was raving about the fourth course - slowboiled bamboo shoot with bonito flakes. This was supposedly a Wahiro specialty and indeed well-deserved! The bamboo shoots were so exceptionally sweet and tender that I couldn't help raving about it with every mouthful I took (although in my recollection, Ikukan does a really mean grilled bamboo with miso paste too... but that's another story). This was followed by a lovely mushi sushi - rice with ikura (salmon roe), which I love for its burst of saltiness in your mouth as you bite into it. The rest of the courses (seaweed wrapped broiled salmon with mini taro ball) and fried rice cake were so-so, plus, we were a bit stuffed by then. I was looking forward to the Yuzu sherbet but it was not to be, so we took our usual matcha ice cream and black sesame ice-cream (good, but not as good as Zipangu).

Overall, a really good experience which left me hankering for more Japanese food.

The day didn't end on this high note though - I got stomach upset almost immediately after I stepped out of the restaurant (nothing to do with Wahiro), it was food poisoning from lunch. And then after getting home, I was hunkered up against the computer working till midnight (this is a busy busy time in my work). Hmm....could almost forget the Ohmigod moment that I officially turned 30.