Beyond Sushi: Japanese Dishes You Have to Try

Sushi is how most people in Singapore meet Japanese food, and it is a bad introduction — not because it isn’t good, but because it is the one part of the cuisine where almost nothing is cooked. Spend an evening in a Japanese kitchen and you find the opposite: fire, smoke, salt, fermentation, and a whole vocabulary of small savoury things designed to be eaten slowly with a drink.

This is a guide to that vocabulary. No rankings, no restaurant list — just the dishes worth knowing, what they actually taste like, and why they exist. We grill over binchotan for a living, so several of these are things we cook every night.

Otsumami: the category that explains the whole meal

Start here, because it reframes everything else. Otsumami are the small savoury dishes eaten alongside a drink — the Japanese answer to tapas, mezze or bar snacks. They are not starters. Nobody is waiting for a main course to arrive.

Salt, fat, acid and umami are dialled up because they are meant to work against alcohol rather than stand alone. That is why edamame turns up everywhere, and why it is far better when someone has done something to it — we toss ours through shiro miso and confit garlic butter over the fire, which turns a default snack into something you keep reaching for.

Once you understand otsumami, the izakaya format stops being confusing. You are not ordering a meal in courses; you are ordering a table that fills up gradually.

Yakitori and kushiyaki: the skewer, and why the charcoal matters

Yakitori is chicken on a skewer over charcoal. Kushiyaki is the broader family — anything grilled on a stick. It looks like the simplest food in the world, which is precisely why it is a fair test of a kitchen.

The variable is the fuel. Binchotan — Japanese white charcoal — burns hot, long and clean, throwing intense radiant heat with very little smoke or flavour of its own. That is the opposite of what most people assume. Good charcoal cooking doesn’t taste of charcoal; it tastes more intensely of the thing being cooked, because the surface caramelises before the interior overcooks.

The other variable is salt versus tare. Salt (shio) exposes the ingredient. Tare — the sweet-savoury soy glaze, built up and reduced over months — flatters it. Order one of each from the same kitchen and you learn more in two skewers than in an hour of reading.

Robatayaki: the open hearth

Where yakitori is skewers over a narrow grill, robatayaki is a wide open hearth cooking whole vegetables, fish and large cuts, traditionally passed to guests on long wooden paddles. The dining-room version of a fisherman’s fire.

The dishes that reward this treatment are the ones with structure — cabbage, eggplant, whole fish, fatty cuts of pork. Heat does something to a dense vegetable that a pan cannot: it collapses the sugars without waterlogging it. Our smoked eggplant babaganoush starts there, over the flame, before it ever meets sesame.

The roe family: ikura, tobiko, mentaiko

Three words that appear constantly on Japanese menus and get conflated constantly.

• Ikura — salmon roe. Large, translucent-orange, individually burstable. Salty, then unexpectedly sweet. We spoon it over chickpea hummus with macadamia tahini, which sounds like a provocation and works because both sides of that plate are built on fat and salt.
• Tobiko — flying fish roe. Much smaller, crunchy rather than bursting, mildly sweet. It is textural more than anything; it makes things pop.
• Mentaiko — pollock roe cured with chilli. Not a garnish but a seasoning: dense, spicy, deeply savoury, and it will take over a dish if you let it.

Mentaiko is the one worth chasing. Cured roe and Mediterranean cured-roe traditions turn out to be cousins — which is how our mentaiko taramasalata happened, and why the cassava chippies we serve with it exist mostly as a delivery system.

Wagyu, and what the grades actually mean

“Wagyu” only means Japanese-breed cattle. It is not a quality grade on its own, and it is used loosely enough on menus to be almost meaningless without a number after it.

The number you will most often see in Singapore is the Australian marble score — MB, from 1 to 9+. It measures intramuscular fat: how much of it, how evenly distributed. MB4+ is well-marbled beef that still eats like steak, with chew and beef flavour intact. MB9+ is a different proposition entirely — so rich that a small portion is the correct portion, and grilling it hard enough to render the fat is the whole job. We serve an Angus ribeye at MB4+ and Blackmore full-blood wagyu karubi at MB9+, and they are ordered by completely different tables.

If a menu says “wagyu” with no grade, no origin and no cut, that tells you something too.

Raw beef, done properly

Raw and near-raw beef preparations — tataki seared at the edges, tartares chopped to order — are standard in Japanese kitchens and make people nervous everywhere else. The nervousness is mostly misplaced, provided the kitchen is sourcing whole muscle, trimming it themselves and serving it the day it is cut.

The Japanese contribution here is acidity. A wasabi ponzu vinaigrette does something a lemon squeeze cannot: it lifts and sharpens without turning the surface grey. That is exactly why it ended up on our kibbeh nayyeh — a Levantine lamb tartare with shio kombu, wheat and salted Cambodian black pepper. Two raw-meat traditions, one dressing.

Sesame: the sauce family nobody talks about

Ask which Japanese sauce matters most and people say soy. The more interesting answer is sesame. Goma runs through the whole cuisine — toasted, ground, emulsified — and it is the reason so many Japanese vegetable dishes taste rich without cream.

Kinnogomadare, golden sesame sauce, is the version worth knowing: nutty, savoury, faintly sweet, thick enough to coat. It is also the exact point where Japanese and Middle Eastern cooking shake hands, because tahini is the same idea arrived at from the other direction. We use kinnogomadare on charred Brussels sprouts with red cabbage pickles, jalapenos and shredded bonito — the single dish people come back for.

Matcha at the end, not the beginning

Matcha in Singapore mostly means a sweet latte. In a Japanese meal its job is the opposite: bitterness to close out a table full of salt and fat.

Good matcha is vividly green and astringent in a clean way. It also behaves oddly in desserts — bitter enough to cut sweetness, which is why matcha tiramisu works so much better than it should. Ours uses matcha sake, arabica coffee and hazelnut feuilletine, and it exists because the bitter-and-cream structure of tiramisu was already halfway to matcha’s natural habitat.

What about ramen, tempura and the famous ones?

They are famous for good reasons and we are not going to pretend otherwise — ramen is one of the most technically demanding things in the cuisine, and a tempura specialist frying to order is watching oil temperature the way a pastry chef watches a proving room. They are simply not what this guide is about, and they are not what we cook. If you want to know where to eat those in Singapore, that belongs in a venue guide, not a dish primer — we cover the landscape in our full guide to Japanese food in Singapore, and the specific plates worth crossing town for in our honest shortlist.

How to build a table out of this

A workable order, and roughly how we’d send it: something pickled or bracing first, then two or three otsumami while everyone settles. Then the roe dish, because it wakes the table up. Then skewers or something off the coals. Then one large cut to share — the wagyu, the pork collar, the whole fish — and only then anything sweet.

The mistake is ordering everything at once and letting it land cold together. The format is designed to be sequential. Order in waves; that is what the kitchen is expecting.

If you want the version of this applied to an actual menu — which dishes, in which order, for how many people — we wrote that up for our own table in what to order at a Japanese-Middle Eastern fusion spot. Otherwise, everything described above is on our menu or in the gallery, and you can book a table at 29 Hamilton Road, Tuesday to Sunday from 5pm.