Japanese Food at Downtown East Pasir Ris

Japanese Food at Downtown East Pasir Ris

I love to eat Japanese food and I heard it's the favourite foreign cuisine amongst Singaporean stomachs. My current favourite restaurant is Nihon Mura at E!Hub Downtown East in a corner of Pasir Ris, which opened recently.

This cozy little restaurant tucked at the highest level of E!Hub in Downtown East offers a plethora of famous japanese dishes. Don't expect to be presented with a traditional menu here. After you are urshered to your table, grab a cup and head straight to the buffet spread. There you will find one of a tag which comes in a wooden stick like the ones doctors used to stick into your throat with the Teriyaki chicken don written on it. Collect this tag and any others that you wish to order into your cup. Once you're done with your menu selection, present this tag to the cashier and wait at your seat in this japanese restaurant. In a while, the dish you ordered will be presented to the table.

My current favourite japanese dish is the Teriyaki Chicken Don. It comes in a piping hot bowl that will burn your japanese rice if you do not scrape the bottom regularly. Even so, some grains of japanese rice still gets burnt but that just adds to the unique flavour. It's almost like eating claypot japanese rice!

The Teriyaki sauce gives a pretty shiok zing to the bits of chicken slices. The crust is rather crunchy with a soft springy core that leaves the mouth full of Teriyaki taste. I particularly like to savour these slices without the japanese rice, so as not to dilute the flavour.

A raw egg sits on the top of this bowl of japanese rice. If you press it with a spoon, the yolk will burst out of its sac and soak into the japanese rice. Once it reaches the hot metal bowl, it will cook rather quickly and relinquish an eggy aroma that sends my salivary glands into overdrive. I prefer to mix the raw egg evenly throughout the rice and sort of fry it like in a frying pan.

No adjective can adequately describe the unique experience of eating this Teriyaki chicken don. Even as I write this post, the rush of saliva forming up in my mouth is making me swallow more frequently than usual. Mmmm... perhaps this weekend again...