S$88 menus and comfort food at Zeniya

OYAKODON, tendon, maguro rice bowls. They’re the stuff of family-style or fast-food Japanese restaurants, but put them in the hands of Shin Takagi and you have comfort food with a Michelin touch. 

The chef-owner of the two-starred Zeniya restaurant in Kanazawa dug into his personal repertoire of homespun recipes when crafting the new S$88 set lunches at his Singapore outpost in the Shangri-La Hotel.  

Introduced as part of an overall adjustment of pricing in response to the tough challenges facing the Japanese restaurant industry, the set lunch has brought out a more accessible side of the high-end restaurant. 

“These are dishes that I haven’t cooked in a long time, but it was fun to revive my father’s old recipes,” says Takagi. “He worked at different restaurants before; so, some of them were not necessarily developed at Zeniya, but are part of his cooking experience.”

There’s also a S$188 menu served for both lunch and dinner that is a scaled-down version of Zeniya’s kaiseki menu. The top menu price has also been revised from S$450 to S$388. But for an easy lunch, it’s the S$88 set that hits the spot. 

You get three starters of salad, comforting chawanmushi with prawns and crabmeat, and some seasonal sashimi.

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Of the three grilled items to choose from, the chicken surprisingly holds its own again the more expensive fish, with a soy-based marinade that’s not too salty and just a tad sweet for balance. Cod is next, with its milky texture, and then salmon, just barely cooked through so that it stays moist. 

It’ll be hard to choose from the main rice bowls. Simmered chicken and egg with lots of savoury-sweet sauce seeping into the rice makes the oyakodon rich and tummy-warming. Tendon – made to Takagi’s father’s old recipe – has a tare that’s mellow and not jarringly sweet like most versions, with a delicate kakiage tempura that still retains enough crunch. Add S$10 for the magurodon, with subtly marinated cubes of tuna piled onto rice. 

Finish off with a scoop of yuzu ice cream and a view of the hotel’s garden from the 24th-floor dining room, and it’s a painless yet fancy enough lunch that will fill the gaps between your Japan trips.