“Affordable izakayas in Singapore” is one of those searches that returns a hundred confident per-head figures and almost no sources. So instead of adding a hundred-and-first, we spent a morning reading six izakayas’ own websites, all the way into their…
Singapore’s izakayas are not spread evenly. They cluster, and they cluster for reasons — where the offices are, where the river bends, where the rent lets a room stay open until three in the morning. If you know the clusters…
A table for one is usually treated as a problem the restaurant has to solve. Somebody counts the covers, somebody moves a place setting, and you end up at a two-top with an empty chair opposite you like a small…
Sake shops that let you stay, a 1945 black market, and why the alley food was offal - the history behind a format that ended up on Hamilton Road.
Mezze arrives together and stays. Izakaya plates arrive in waves and go. Seven rules for a table that runs both at once, drawn from our own two menus.
Four axes that decide which kind of room you want tonight, and where our own two venues sit on them - including one that splits the definition down the middle.
What kanpai means, why nobody drinks before the toast, and the pouring rules that go with it - plus the one part of it worth borrowing at a table in Jalan Besar.
The small dish you did not order and cannot send back. What otoshi is, what it costs, whether you can refuse it, and what happens instead at a Japanese-Middle Eastern izakaya in Singapore.
The last two drinks on our cocktail card, and the only two that lead with FRUITY. A lychee martini with sake in it, an apple highball from Japan's apple prefecture, and one ingredient our own card refuses to identify.
Gentian, pink perilla, matcha sake and a hazelnut that turns up in exactly two places on our menus. What is in Ume & Bitter and Matcha Milk, and what our own paperwork will not tell you.