Vegetable sushi? Ki Su tries to woo sceptics with plant-based omakase

NEW RESTAURANT

Ki Su Shoujin Omakase 60 Tras Street #01-01 Singapore 078999 Tel: 8522-6824 Open for lunch and dinner Mon to Sat: 12 pm to 3 pm; 6 pm to 10 pm.

SAVE the fish. Tuna are dying out. Oysters don’t wanna be shucked anymore. Don’t kill cows, slaughter a red pepper instead. At least it doesn’t bleed. Or skewer an eggplant – have you ever heard one scream?

We’re familiar with the clarion call. Be vegetarian. It’s good for you, good for the planet. But it’s just that we really don’t want to. Even though we risk climate change prophets, health enthusiasts and all round damp squibs shaking their heads: “People like you will literally be the death of us.”

So people like us are at Ki Su, with its meatless omakase that feels like a mother trying to convince her kid that broccoli tastes great if it’s shaped like an airplane.

Our airplane is sushi, as the chefs sculpt, slice, torch and manipulate vegetables to look like tuna or uni, shaped into individual nigiri. Without our glasses, you can almost fool us. At least until we eat it.

Although it serves “sushi” and follows a loose kaiseki format, there’s nothing Japanese about Ki Su – even if it did inherit a sushi restaurant lock, stock and barrel. It claims to be inspired by Shojin Ryori, but it comes nowhere close to the Buddhist-inspired cuisine that preserves the integrity of ingredients and tradition. Ki Su’s dishes feel more like the work of a very fertile imagination in woo-woo land. Sometimes you wonder if you’re eating vegetarian or just sponsoring someone’s R&D kitchen.

Ki Su is the spawn of Joie, another vegetarian restaurant that already shows innovative tendencies with some success. But at S$88 for dinner, it’s a painless gamble to make. Ki Su charges S$168 for dinner (S$88 for lunch), which is quite a pinch for wavering non-vegetarians.

The good intentions are there, starting from a personalised note at the start, thanking you for choosing the restaurant and how the chefs have taken great care in creating your meal. So yes, they look well-meaning, and you look petty.

SEE ALSO

Former Zouk morphs into mod-Asian Jiak Kim House, serving laksa pasta and mushroom bak kut teh

The opening act is pretty. A crisp beetroot cigar filled with a sharp apple salad. A wooden box neatly filled with red and green beans supports a cracker with a piping of avocado cream and a confit egg yolk sandwiched between toast and “air-flown” tonburi or fake caviar. Never use “air-flown”  too liberally because the next question is always, “when?” We suspect it’s been a while, although the egg yolk on toast idea is the closest we get to meaty satisfaction.

Of course, the sushi doppelgangers are exactly that, with seasoned rice under tender broiled capsicum, shimeji mushrooms, eggplant and pumpkin “uni” carefully shaped to resemble the ridges of sea urchin lobes. It tastes like sweet pumpkin puree, possibly cooked in seasoned dashi for a vague brininess, garnished with super-realistic fake ikura. The resemblance to their real counterparts is almost uncanny, but it’s not much different from eating mock char siew at your neighbourhood vegetarian stall.

Which is our main beef – if you can call it that – with Ki Su. Its obsession with making vegetables look like their meat counterparts just goes against the idea of putting vegetables up front and centre. Why not let eggplants and pumpkins be themselves, and cook them in delicious ways so you don’t keep making comparisons? One recent meal we had at Ami Patisserie may have been vegetable-driven, but done in such a spontaneous way that we didn’t miss the meat.

That said, Ki Su’s work at snipping a king oyster mushroom to emulate a fat scallop is pretty impressive, especially the way it separates when you cut it. Paired with pea puree, it makes its point.

One wacky idea involves chewing on an oyster leaf to get the shellfish taste in your mouth before being handed a fried piece of rice puff-covered mushroom in a sheet of nori topped with a spicy mayonnaise. It’s nice and hot, and tastes just like Korean seaweed crackers. It’s a cool riff that makes this one of the meal’s highlights.

Less so is the ho-hum beancurd skin wrapped mushrooms and cherry tomato, or the gut-sticking – and not in a nice way – overkill of monkey head mushrooms simmered in a brown sauce and resembling braised meat. 

We don’t care for the desserts – a pretty but unfathomable layering of nutty crumble, soya pudding that looks gruesomely like mashed up tau hway, caramel-like sesame sauce, topped with matcha powder and leaves. It’s like trying very hard to understand someone else’s existential state of mind, and then deciding, “whatever for?”.

In the same way, freeze-drying edible flowers in front of you and crushing them over convenience store-quality Hokkaido milk ice cream is more effort than pleasure.

You can certainly get full eating here, but in a “my stomach is full but my heart still wants yakitori” way. We get that Ki Su appeals to a niche market; and one fine day, we’ll be one of them too. But today is not the day.

Rating: 6