What Is Wafu? Japanese-Style Dressing, Explained

One line on our menu ends in a word most people read straight past. Under Small Plates, the wood-smoked Norwegian salmon salata comes with shaved fennel, dill, haricot vert, fried chickpeas and an orange-wafu vinaigrette. Fennel, dill and chickpeas you can picture. “Wafu” is the one that stops people, and it turns out to be a very old word doing a very modern job.

This is what it means, where the dressing it names comes from, and what the menu does and does not tell you about ours.

The word: “Japanese style”, and nothing more specific

Wafu is waū, written 和風, and it means “Japanese style”. Dictionaries define it as having central elements modelled on traditional Japanese culture, and give its opposite as yōfū, 洋風, “Western style”. The same two characters also mean a light breeze, which is worth knowing only because it shows how ordinary the second half is: 風, fū, is wind, and by extension a style, a custom, a manner.

The first half is the interesting one. Wa is the oldest attested name for Japan itself. From around the 2nd century AD, Chinese and Korean scribes wrote it with a character, 倭, whose meanings include “submissive”, “distant” and “dwarf”. In the 8th century the Japanese started writing it with a different character instead, 和, which means harmony, peace or balance, precisely because the older one was offensive. So every time a Japanese menu says wa-anything, it is using the name the country chose for itself over the one it was given.

You meet the word constantly once you know it. Washoku is traditional Japanese food. In the Western-influenced cooking that grew up in Japan from the Meiji era, known as yōshoku, “wafu” turns up as a prefix on dishes that took a European idea and pulled it back towards Japan: wafu kinoko spaghetti, for example, is a Japanese-style soy sauce and mushroom spaghetti. That is the job the word does. It does not name a recipe. It tells you which direction the cooking leans.

Wafu dressing: a vinaigrette that took the Japanese route

In practice, though, when “wafu” sits in front of a dressing it does point at something fairly definite. Waū doresshingu, Japanese-style dressing, is a vinaigrette-type salad dressing. The standard version is a mix of soy sauce, rice vinegar, mirin and vegetable oil. From there it branches: versions flavoured with aonori, shiso, grated ginger, katsuobushi, umeboshi purée, wasabi, or citrus such as lemon or yuzu. Swap in sesame oil and it gets a different name altogether, chūka or “Chinese-style” dressing.

It helps to hold that next to what a vinaigrette is in the first place. The word is the French diminutive of vinaigre, vinegar, and the thing itself is an edible oil mixed with a mild acid, vinegar or lemon juice, traditionally three parts oil to one part acid, whisked into an emulsion. A wafu dressing keeps that skeleton and changes what hangs on it. The acid is rice vinegar. The salt comes from soy sauce rather than from the salt cellar, and brings the savouriness we wrote about in our soy sauce explainer. Mirin adds a little sweetness.

The oil matters more than you might think. Under Japan’s JAS standards, a “non-oil” dressing, thickened instead of emulsified, is not technically classed as a dressing at all; it is filed as a “dressing-type seasoning”. Take the oil out and, officially, you have made something else.

Where it really comes from: the old vinegar mixtures

The bottled salad dressing is modern. The flavour logic underneath it is not. Japanese cooking has long had a family of awasezu, mixed vinegars, and wafu dressing is usually described as resting on one of them.

Nihaizu, “two-cup vinegar”: vinegar with soy sauce or salt, sometimes with dashi. Used for vinegared fish and shellfish and in hotpots.
Sanbaizu, “three-cup vinegar”: vinegar with soy sauce and sugar or mirin, a little sweeter.
Tosazu, “Tosa vinegar”: nihaizu or sanbaizu with katsuobushi, the dried, smoked bonito, added. Used for dressed dishes. The name is geographical: Tosa, today’s Kōchi Prefecture, is famous for katsuobushi, so dishes that use it are often called “Tosa”-something.

Read that list against the standard wafu recipe and the family resemblance is obvious. Soy, vinegar and mirin is a sanbaizu. Add oil, whisk, and you have taken a Japanese seasoning mixture down the vinaigrette road. Add katsuobushi and you are back in tosazu territory, with the bonito-and-kombu savouriness our umami post explains.

One distinction worth drawing, because the two get mixed up: wafu dressing is not ponzu. Ponzu is a thin citrus sauce built on vinegar, mirin, kombu and bonito, with soy usually added; there is no oil in it. It is on our menu three times and has its own write-up. A wafu dressing has oil in it by definition. Similar flavours, different structure, different job.

On our menu: the orange-wafu vinaigrette

Here is the line, exactly as the food menu prints it:

WOOD SMOKED NORWEGIAN SALMON SALATA — shaved fennel, dill, haricot vert, fried chickpeas, orange-wafu vinaigrette

Read it with the definitions above and it makes sense. The citrus branch of the wafu family usually reaches for lemon or yuzu; this one uses orange. That is the same move we described in our piece on how Japanese and Middle Eastern cooking fit together: a recipe that already has an acid slot, with a different fruit put in it. The salmon is smoked over wood, which brings richness and smoke. The fennel and dill read as the plate’s European half, the fried chickpeas as its Levantine half, and a soy-and-vinegar dressing with orange in it is the Japanese thread running through the lot.

It is also not the only vinaigrette on that part of the menu. Two lines down, the kibbeh nayyeh, our Margra lamb tartare, comes with a wasabi ponzu vinaigrette. Two small plates, both dressed with a vinaigrette built on a Japanese acid. If you have ever wondered what “fusion” means on our card in practice, those two lines are a fair answer.

What the menu does not tell you

One line of menu copy leaves a lot out, and we would rather say so than fill the gaps with guesses.

It does not say whether the orange is juice, zest or both.
It does not say which oil the vinaigrette uses, or whether there is sesame oil in it, which would technically push it towards the chūka side of the family.
It does not say whether there is mirin, katsuobushi or kombu in it, or which soy sauce is used.
It does not say whether the salmon is smoked in-house.

So everything above about what wafu dressing usually contains is about the category, not a recipe card for ours. If any of it matters to you, for an allergy or just out of curiosity, ask at the table before you order.

Making it at home

If you want to taste the category for yourself, the standard version is easy to make from things most kitchens have: soy sauce, rice vinegar, a splash of mirin and a neutral oil, shaken or whisked until it holds together for a moment. Start with less soy than you think you need, because it is doing the work salt would do in a French vinaigrette. Then pick a branch: grated ginger, a little wasabi, or a squeeze of citrus. Yuzu is the classic citrus, and our yuzu explainer covers why it costs what it does. Orange, as our menu shows, works too.

Pour it over something plain the first time, crisp lettuce or shredded daikon, the way a Japanese side salad would have it, so you can taste the dressing rather than the salad.

Wafu in one line

It means “Japanese style”, it uses the name Japan chose for itself, and on a dressing it usually means soy sauce, rice vinegar, mirin and oil, with a seasoning added. On our menu that seasoning is orange. You will find the salmon salata under Small Plates on the menu at 29 Hamilton Road, Jalan Besar, open Tuesday to Sunday, 5pm to 11pm, with brunch on Saturday and Sunday from 11am to 2.30pm. If you are working out what else to order with it, our ordering guide builds a meal in three layers, and for the wider map of Japanese food in the city, start with our full guide to Japanese food in Singapore. When you are ready, book a table.

Sources

Our own Hamilton Road food menu (PDF), read 3 October 2026, for the salmon salata and kibbeh nayyeh lines.
Wiktionary, “和風” (citing the Japan Kanji Aptitude Testing Foundation’s Kanjipedia), for the meanings of wafu and yōfū.
Wikipedia, “Wa (name of Japan)”, for the history of the character.
Wikipedia, “Wafu dressing”, for the standard ingredients and variations.
Wikipedia, “Yōshoku”, for wafu as a menu prefix.
Wikipedia, “Vinaigrette”, for the definition and the traditional ratio.
Japanese Wikipedia, “サラダドレッシング” (salad dressing), for the JAS classification of non-oil dressings.
Kotobank: Shōgakukan’s Digital Daijisen for nihaizu and sanbaizu; Kōdansha’s world cuisine dictionary for tosazu.

Habibi-san