Catch up at The Neighborhood

We thought it was a great idea when our friend B and H suggested to meet up over dinner at The Neighborhood on a Friday evening. It’s a been a while since we last visited Chef David at his restaurant, and we always love to come back here to eat at any time. The place has become even more popular than it was, now that it’s ranked one of the Asia’s Top 50, but at least we finally got our table confirmed a couple of days before.

Shoku at The Pulse

Lately there seemed to be quite some buzzes from this new shopping/dining premise called The Pulse at Repulse Bay, featuring a few new and interesting restaurants, many of which received excellent reviews. A few weeks ago, I had the opportunity to try one of them, a Japanese restaurant called Shoku, at a dinner organized by their PR team.

Omakase in Singapore - Dinner at Ikyu

I was eager to try out some Japanese food in Singapore to see how it compared to the ones at home, so I started googling around looking for a decent place. Of course there are the likes of Shinji by Kanesaka (at the Raffles) or Shiraishi (at The Ritz) or the two at Marina Bay Sands (Waku Ghin and Hide Yamamoto) but I am not looking at that kind of ridiculous price range. At the end I found this relatively new restaurant right in my favorite neighborhood and I gave it a try.

Ikyu (一休) is one of the latest additions to the hip Tiong Bahru area, opened about 9 months ago. It's on Yong Siak Street, sharing the same block as other trendy spots such as 40 Hands Coffee (Cafe), Open Door Policy (Bistro), Books Actually (Bookstore) and many others. Chef Takuma Seki came from Hide Yamamoto at Marina Bay Sands, and the restaurant serves "sexy", "daringly different" Japanese cuisine, as mentioned on the website, with most of the ingredients flown in from Japan direct.