With a new business partner and a bold new look, Hashida Singapore on Amoy Street is well primed to garner even more fans
News of a restaurant opening tend to be met with cautious optimism, especially in a city this spoilt for choice. But when diners learned of Hashida Singapore’s comeback on Amoy Street (after moving from previous addresses at the Mandarin Gallery and Mohamed Sultan Road), the excitement was irrefutable, even expected.
Chef Kenjiro ‘Hatch’ Hashida, the maestro at the helm, has after all made quite an impression on the island’s most discerning diners, since he opened his first eponymous restaurant here in 2013. This time, though, he has partnered with the OUE Restaurants (the food and lifestyle division of global property developer OUE Limited) and subsequently managed to secure a space within one of Singapore’s hottest dining enclave.
Hatch—as he is affectionally known—is an atypical Japanese chef whose innovative spirit has quickly outgrown expectations one might have placed on the son of a renowned master sushi chef. But it pays to keep in mind that woven into his exploration of the global influences on the modern sushi omakase is a reverence for his culinary heritage.
(Related: Singapore's Top Chefs Share New Ways to Savour Japanese Produce from Gunma)
Evidence of this is set in the restaurant’s updated design, and they are subtle, intelligent and in some areas artfully quirky. Like the use of Hiba wood—a species native to Aomori where Hatch’s father is from—for the countertops in two of the three dining rooms, and even recycled 200-year-old wood beams from an old house in Kyoto that are used as decorative panels in the third and smallest room. In contrast are more modern accents, such as a cloud-like lighting fixture in the largest (12-seater) dining room that Hatch had helped design. This, he suggested, could also be seen as “mountains” or “waves”—open in fact to interpretation—noting how the idea is meant to reflect his uninhibited culinary imaginations as well.
