Good value Japanese menus at Fukui

NEW RESTAURANT

Fukui 25 Mohamed Sultan Road Singapore 238969 Tel: 6509 0909 Open for lunch and dinner Mon to Sat: 12pm to 3pm; 6pm to 10.30pm.

NOT being able to travel to Japan does strange things to the mind. We visit an izakaya in Orchard Plaza just to pretend we're in a bar in Tokyo's Shimbashi, downing whisky highballs and eating salty kushiyaki. Sometimes, we stare at a sprig of cherry blossoms in our sashimi platter and cry. We sit glued to the Waku Waku channel, deliberately ignoring the subtitles so we don't understand what we're watching. And when someone opens a restaurant called Fukui, we immediately book an air ticket, oops, make a reservation, to relive memories of the crashing waves of the Sea of Japan and the famed echizen crabs that are synonymous with it.

Instead, we find a restaurant whose owners deal with their Japan withdrawal symptoms in a different way - by opening an eatery named after a prefecture they've never even been to.

Like finding out a precious gift of musk melon isn't from Shizuoka but a farm in Putrajaya, we listen - if not patiently - to a folksy tale of two sisters who'd always wanted to visit a city beyond the familiar ground of Tokyo-Osaka-Kyoto-Sapporo, but Covid-19 put paid to any such plans. So if they couldn't get to the mountains of Fukui, they would just paint their own - as a backdrop on the walls of the main dining room in the Mohamed Sultan Road eatery that will be familiar to sushi aficionados as the former home of Hashida Sushi.

Fukui gets to piggyback on Hashida's design aesthetic which provides a ready made canvas for its conventional but well executed menus that are appealingly priced from S$88 for lunch and S$188 at dinner.

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While you can get by at lunchtime on a simple S$88 set of appetiser, sashimi, grilled dish and a mini chirashi sushi, springing for a S$138 Tsuki set or S$188 Ido gives you better insight into what its Singaporean head chef Nick Pa'an can do. With tattoos and a slick hairstyle instead of the more familiar shaven head and Japanese accent, chef Pa'an acquits himself well with his quiet but amiable demeanour and disciplined operations.

There's thankfully no attempt at engaging local guests with a kind of shared 'brudder' familiarity - just a quiet elegance and a smattering of Japanese here and there that gives Fukui a neutral, upscale feel. Of course, it can't always hide its inner Chinese restaurant from the reusable chopsticks (Japanese restaurants always use disposable), slippery satin napkins and the use of cast iron hot plates used to blowtorch sushi behind the counter - the kind that usually hold sizzling plates of deer meat or a Hainanese steak at Jack's Place.

What appears before you though, is artfully composed, with only minimal differences between the S$138 and S$188 set. Both begin with a cold dish of salty ikura and shiro ebi or baby white shrimp, followed by a smoky 'warayaki' butterfish that's adequately fleshy and oily, drizzled in a soy dressing with a hint of truffle oil and scattering of black truffle shavings.

The sashimi platter differs only with slightly more expensive botan ebi and toro in the S$188 set. But otherwise both feature fresh, medium quality fish and shellfish beautifully composed on ceramic platters.

Plump grilled white unagi is creamy and more satisfying than the dryish grilled cod with a mild teriyaki glaze in the cheaper set. The more expensive menu gets you several pieces of sushi that are lovingly draped over balls of gummy rice - a selection of kampachi, shima aji, sayori, tai, hirame and hotate come in fairly quick succession. They all lead to the same conclusion - come here for the raw fish, not the sushi. If you must have something with rice, the cheaper set appeals with a mini chirashi sushi of thick slabs of seafood covering a small amount of rice, with crunchy toasted puffs and seeds scattered over the lot, and an unnecessary drizzle of truffle oil.

Later, the chef kindly passes you a complimentary ball of warm rice topped with ice cold negitoro that really hits the spot.

What also warms our hearts is the chef's soups with a distinctive Chinese influence - a large bowl of clear but intense dashi with fish cubes, mushrooms and tofu, and a robust egg drop soup enriched with a prawn head.

Dessert is assorted fruit or home made black sesame ice cream with a pleasant toasty, grainy texture.

While you may leave with some room for a snack later, you won't begrudge the restaurant especially at this kind of pricing. Serviceable and pleasant, Fukui is a place for repeat visits that won't be financially damaging - it won't bring you any closer to the actual prefecture in spirit, but there's always Waku Waku to fall back on.

Rating: 6.5

DINING OUT WHAT OUR RATINGS MEAN

10: The ultimate dining experience9-9.5: Sublime8-8.5: Excellent7-7.5: Good to very good6-6.5: Promising5-5.5: Average

Our review policy: The Business Times pays for all meals at restaurants reviewed on this page. Unless specified, the writer does not accept hosted meals prior to the review's publication.