Yoshiyuki
by Qian Leung
@ 30 Jun 2017
Located in Forum The Shopping Mall, Yoshiyuki is a 20 seater which offers the Japanese temple kaiseki ryori cuisine of Chef Yoshi Kashiwabara, who used to cook for the former Japanese ambassador of Singapore.
Settle yourself into one of the counter seats and savour the aromas of a dish or horse mackerel placed before you. The silver has been cured between leaves of kombu and is served over the yellow petals and green leaves of chrysanthemum, which has been simmered in dashi. A mouth watering egg yolk sauce, along with pink ginger blossom, garnishes the dish.
In the next dish, the breath-taking beauty of winter can be seen with a large simmered chestnut; ginko nuts, fried, carved into pine needles; sweet potato jelly, shaped into ginko leaf.
Also, you have rice popcorn - sweet rice gently fried and puffed up until they are crunchy. Komochi kombu salted cod roe in sudachi lime cup, topped with bonito. Baigai ivory shell whelk, simmered in dashi with mirin and sakae, is springy and toothsome, and anago sea eel, wrapped around burdock root and grilled, is sweet, juicy and tender.
There is also tamari sushi, topped with hirame flounder, smoked salmon rolled with turnip and fried arrowhead and lotus chip which shatter under your palate cheerily.
It is incredible to watch Chef Kashiwabara slicing daikon in one huge strip for the next dishm which is a yuzu cup holding the hand-cut daikon, baby eggplant, poached tiger prawn, snow pea, pumpkin, mushroom, broccoli rabe and fried tofu skin set in a sheet, rolled up and then sliced.
To complete the meal, tuck into Japanese rice cooked in dashi and topped with Hokkaido crab, yuzu zest and kinome sancho and finish on a sweet note with silken black sesame pudding and the sweetest melon you have ever tasted from Mount Fuji. QL
