No, we did not have sushi at Sushi Jin (1 Farrer Park Station Road, Owen Link, #01-11/12, tel : +65 6443 3378). I think we would have wanted to. Or at least try their chirashi, but we decided to go red meat for this lunch.
We started with their truffle seafood chawanmushi. It's an a la carte item separately ordered out of their lunch sets. This was very good, I could see that they tried to justify the cost with the ingredients which were of good quality and very safe but pleasing flavours of contemporary Japanese.
There was a wagyu foie gras don. At $39 we didn't expect top grade beef, but I don't think it was worth what we paid. We had no idea what cut of meat it was, but it was a rather small piece and since the menu did state that it was wagyu, we had expectations. Honestly, I couldn't tell this from any other decent quality beef. Even at the medium rare, we weren't getting the melt in your mouth thing. The foie gras was nicely done, so that was the salvation of this bowl. The rice was a little too little and that was such a pity since their sweet sauce was actually good with the rice.
Their wagyu don came with an onsen tamago. Same beef (pun definitely intended) as the previous donburi and the tamago was the real icing. This bowl had the same flavour profile as the truffle seafood chawanmushi because there was truffle soy sauce. In fairness, there were little we could have been unhappy about. In the same vein of fairness as well, we also thought it wasn't really impressive for $35. For less than half of what it cost here, we felt just slightly less better with the short rib and less fancy rendition at Tanuki Raw.
I was really curious about their lamb with black garlic sauce but this was when things went downhill. The meat was quite overcooked to the point that it was probably medium well. While the meat wasn't tough, it wasn't quite ideally tender. And I totally didn't like the black garlic sauce which tasted like a viscous sweet teriyaki that had overtones of ginger.
The odd thing was, there came from the chef the usual excuse about using the sauce as a foil for the lamb-y flavour which some people may dislike to justify the outcome of this dish without us even asking - and frankly, it was a tired one. Why the hell else would I order lamb if I didn't enjoy the flavours of the meat? I mean, why in the world would anyone even? It was way more enjoyable getting grilled lamb chops from Marché. You can quote me on that.
This is where I drop names. I know Sushi Jin is by Les Amis. We've previously had nothing but good experiences in our very limited visits to Les Amis' restaurants. I understand that this wasn't a high end gig and it wouldn't be fair to compare against an outfit like Aoki. With all things duly considered, this lunch was only marginally less expensive and that at a location with a much cheaper rental. Aoki gave us desserts while this one gave us chocolate ice cream that tasted like Wall's. And we had the fortune to watch the new guy in front of us screw up a tuna maki.
Pity cuz I wanted to like this place.
No comments:
Post a Comment