Japanese Brunch in Singapore: Three Ways Restaurants Translate It

Brunch is not a Japanese meal. There is no traditional Japanese course called brunch, and a traditional Japanese breakfast is typically rice, soup, fish and pickles, served early. So when a Singapore restaurant sells a “Japanese brunch”, it is translating, and the useful question is how. We read the menus and terms of three places that do it this week, each in a different way, and we put our own weekend brunch at the end, because it is a fourth way and we would rather say so than pretend otherwise.

Everything below comes from each restaurant’s own website or its own menu file, read on 24 October 2026. Prices change, so check on the day.

Three ways to turn a Japanese meal into a weekend late morning

Look past the word and the restaurants that use it fall into roughly three shapes:

  • The course menu, made choosable. A hotel Japanese restaurant takes its kaiseki-style sequence of courses and lets you pick one dish per course, then sells free-flow drinks on top. Keyaki at Pan Pacific Singapore is the example here.
  • The unlimited spread. A buffet-style service of the kitchen’s signatures, priced per head, with drinks packages layered over it. Nobu Singapore’s Saturday brunch works this way.
  • The set tray, early. No brunch branding at all: a teishoku restaurant that simply opens in the late morning and serves the everyday Japanese set meal. Yayoi is the clearest case.

Keyaki: seven courses, one choice at each

Keyaki is the Japanese restaurant on Level 4 of Pan Pacific Singapore, 7 Raffles Boulevard, Marina Square, set in the hotel’s Japanese garden with a koi pond. Its weekend brunch page describes “a kaiseki-style brunch that is presented in an okonomi concept”: seven courses, several options in each, and you choose.

The current offer page gives the terms as every Saturday, Sunday and public holiday, 11.30am to 2.30pm, at SGD 88 per person, subject to service charge and prevailing government taxes. The brunch menu file linked from that page is dated March 2024 in its file name. It adds a last order of 2pm and gives two free-flow top-ups, last pour at 2pm: a Prosecco package at SGD 48 (Prosecco, house white and red, house sake, beer) and a Champagne package at SGD 90 (the offer page names Taittinger Brut Réserve).

The menu file is worth reading because it is a small lesson in how a Japanese course meal is built. Its seven headings are Japanese words, and each one tells you what kind of cooking is coming:

  • Kobachi, “small bowls”: here, four chef’s-choice appetisers.
  • Sashimi: white fish, salmon and sweet shrimp, with a SGD 28 supplement to swap one for two pieces of toro.
  • Yakimono, grilled things: cod teriyaki, Hokkaido Shirakaba pork with miso, prawns two ways, a Hyogo oyster, or chicken wings with potato truffle.
  • Nimono or agemono, simmered or fried: braised Hokkaido pork belly or fried barramundi in an ankake sauce (the card spells it “anakake”), assorted tempura, or tori tatsuta age.
  • Teppanyaki: US beef, chicken thigh, lamb rack, or prawn and scallop; wagyu is a SGD 45 supplement.
  • Shokuji, literally “meal”: the rice-or-noodle course that closes the savoury part. Soft shell crab roll, inaniwa udon, garlic fried rice or a mini bara chirashi don.
  • Dessert: fruit, green tea or sesame ice cream, lime or yuzu sorbet, with musk melon at SGD 15 extra.

That order (small starters, raw, grilled, simmered or fried, then rice) follows the logic of a kaiseki meal, where the courses are defined by cooking method rather than by ingredient. One caution: the menu file is from March 2024 and the offer page does not reprint the dishes, so treat the list as a guide to the shape rather than a promise of this weekend’s choices.

Nobu Singapore: Saturday only, and unlimited

Nobu Singapore is on Level 3 at 190 Orchard Boulevard. Its own hours page lists brunch on Saturday only, 12pm to 2.30pm; on Sundays the dining room serves lunch instead.

Its menu page calls the Saturday brunch “Taste of Nobu” and describes it as an unlimited brunch: sushi, salads, desserts and a live cooking station, drawn from the restaurant’s signature dishes. The price printed is 168, with children aged 5 to 12 at 84, subject to 10% service charge and applicable government taxes. The brunch section does not name individual dishes.

The drinks are where Nobu’s page is most specific. There are three add-on packages: Zero at 38 (non-alcoholic, including two house mocktails and Heineken Zero), Classic at 58 (Prosecco, wines, house spirits and Sapporo draft), and Luxe at 98 (adding Champagne, a Nobu junmai sake and a short cocktail list). Guests on an alcoholic package can add 90 minutes of free-flow at the bar afterwards for a further 45.

At these numbers the plus-plus matters. Our guide to reading free-flow brunch terms walks through the arithmetic.

Yayoi: the teishoku tray, from 10.30am

The third way is the plainest and the cheapest. Yayoi does not sell a brunch. It sells teishoku, the Japanese set meal of a main dish with rice, soup and small sides on one tray, and its five Singapore restaurants all open from 10.30am to 9pm daily: 100AM on Tras Street (Tanjong Pagar), The Star Vista (Buona Vista), United Square (Novena), Northpoint City (Yishun) and Pasir Ris Mall. That 10.30am opening is what makes it a late-morning option.

Its homepage this week lists new sets including a tori kurozu teishoku at $14.90, an asari sakamushi (sake-steamed clams) teishoku at $13.90, a mentai mayo salmon teishoku at $18.90 and a beef steak teishoku at $22.90. The full menu is a PDF without readable text, so we have not quoted it further.

Yayoi’s own brand page traces the name to Yayoi-ken, a Western-style restaurant that opened in Tokyo’s Kayabacho in 1886, as Western food was arriving in Japan. Japanese dining has been absorbing other cuisines for a long time.

Which one fits your weekend

  • A celebration with a set price you can predict: Keyaki. Seven courses, your choices, SGD 88 before service and tax, drinks optional.
  • A long Saturday with a group: Nobu. Unlimited food at 168, packages from 38 to 98, and it only runs one day a week.
  • Something Japanese and everyday before noon: Yayoi. Open from 10.30am, sets from about $14.

All three are Japanese restaurants serving Japanese food. If you want a wider list of those, our guide to Japanese restaurants in Singapore is venue by venue.

And the fourth way: ours (yes, this is us)

We serve brunch on Saturdays and Sundays, 11am to 2.30pm, at 29 Hamilton Road. It is not a Japanese brunch in any of the three senses above, and we would not sell it as one. It is a Middle Eastern and Western brunch card with Japanese accents: a thick hotcake with burnt honey and miso ash butter, a savoury one with yuzu hollandaise, Japanese curry creamed spinach inside the Breakfast Beast, an orange wafu vinaigrette on the salmon salad, and Suntory’s Premium Malt’s on the drinks card, next to a shakshouka and a mezze platter.

That is the same idea as the rest of this post run the other way round: Japanese flavours folded into a brunch, rather than a Japanese meal moved to the late morning. Every line of the card, with prices, is in our weekend brunch post. We are not halal (there is a bacon chop on the card), and brunch books through the same Chope page as dinner.

For the rest of the city’s weekend late mornings, our brunch guide to Singapore is sorted by neighbourhood and occasion, the ranked brunch list covers the cafes, and the Sunday brunch guide is for the slower end of the weekend. You can see our room in daylight in the gallery, and if this is the weekend, book a table.

Sources, all read on 24 October 2026: Pan Pacific Singapore’s Keyaki restaurant page, its “A Japanese Weekend Brunch at Keyaki” offer page and the linked brunch menu PDF (file dated March 2024); Nobu Singapore’s menus page and contact-and-hours page; Yayoi Singapore’s homepage, find-us page and brand story page. Course-name glosses follow the standard kaiseki vocabulary.