The Best Modern Japanese, Beyond Sushi

Sushi has, understandably, dominated how Singapore talks about Japanese food for the better part of two decades, and the city’s omakase counters remain some of its most sought-after tables. But treating sushi as the whole of Japanese cuisine is a bit like treating a single French bistro classic as the whole of French cooking. Japan’s culinary tradition is vast, regionally varied, and considerably more expansive than raw fish over rice, and a growing number of Singapore kitchens have begun exploring that wider territory with genuine seriousness.

Kappo: The Format Worth Understanding

Kappo dining sits somewhere between the formality of kaiseki and the intimacy of an omakase counter, built around a chef cooking directly in front of a small group of diners, moving fluidly between raw, grilled, and simmered dishes over the course of a meal rather than following the rigid, seasonally coded structure of a full kaiseki course. The format rewards a chef with genuine range, since a kappo menu might move from a delicate sashimi course to a rich, slow-braised dish within a handful of plates, demanding technical versatility that a sushi-only counter never has to demonstrate. Several counter-dining kitchens rewriting the format locally have leaned specifically into this style, building menus that showcase a chef’s full range rather than a single technique.

Robatayaki: Fire as the Whole Point

Where kappo emphasises range, robatayaki narrows the focus to a single technique executed with obsessive precision: grilling over binchotan charcoal, an extremely dense, slow-burning hardwood charcoal that produces intense, clean heat with minimal smoke. A proper robata counter treats the grill the way a sushi counter treats the fish case — as the entire point of the meal, with skewers of vegetables, seafood, and meat arriving in careful sequence, each cooked to a precise degree that changes entirely depending on the ingredient. The format is more casual than kaiseki or kappo, closer in spirit to an izakaya, but the technical discipline underneath the casual presentation is considerable.

What to Order at a Serious Robata Counter

• Start with something delicate — a simply grilled seasonal vegetable — to calibrate the kitchen’s heat control before moving to richer items.
• Ask what is being grilled that day rather than ordering purely from memory; the best robata counters change their skewer selection based on what arrived at market that morning.
• Pace the meal deliberately. A proper robata dinner unfolds slowly, course by course, rather than arriving all at once.

Where Sushi Fits Into a Wider Picture

None of this is to diminish sushi itself, which remains one of the most technically demanding formats in Japanese cooking, and the city’s strongest omakase counters continue to deserve their reputation. The point, rather, is that sushi has become such a dominant reference point that many diners never think to ask what else a serious Japanese kitchen might offer. A chef trained in the broader Japanese tradition typically has command of considerably more than nigiri technique — simmered dishes, tempura, grilled fish prepared whole, and delicate soup courses that rarely make it onto a Western diner’s radar simply because sushi has crowded out the conversation.

For diners who want to understand sushi itself more deeply rather than move past it entirely, it is worth reading further on how to order sushi properly, since even within the format most familiar to Singapore diners, there remains considerably more nuance than most menus reveal at first glance.

Reading a Menu for Genuine Ambition

The clearest signal that a Japanese restaurant is operating beyond the standard sushi playbook is a menu built around technique and season rather than a fixed list of items available year-round. A kitchen offering a genuinely rotating kappo or kaiseki-style tasting menu, changing meaningfully with the seasons rather than swapping a garnish here and there, is usually staffed by a chef with training well beyond sushi fundamentals. Similarly, a robata counter that sources its charcoal specifically and can speak knowledgeably about it is signalling a level of technical seriousness worth trusting on the rest of the menu too.

“Sushi is maybe fifteen percent of what a properly trained Japanese chef actually knows how to cook,” one composite chef running a kappo-style counter in Singapore has observed. “The rest of it is just as interesting, if people would only ask.”

Tempura and the Discipline of Frying Well

Of all the techniques a serious Japanese kitchen might showcase beyond sushi, tempura is perhaps the most underrated, largely because it is so poorly executed elsewhere that most diners have never tasted it done properly. A genuinely skilled tempura chef treats batter temperature, oil temperature, and timing with the same obsessive precision a sushi chef brings to rice, producing a coating so light it barely registers as fried at all, shattering rather than crunching, with the ingredient inside cooked to a precise, often barely-set degree. A tempura counter, distinct from a tempura course tacked onto a broader menu, is worth seeking out specifically for this reason — the format demands the kind of singular focus that produces genuine mastery.

Simmered dishes, or nimono, offer a further window into a kitchen’s range, relying on a precisely balanced dashi and a patient hand rather than any dramatic technique. These dishes rarely photograph as strikingly as a plate of nigiri or a smoking robata skewer, which may explain why they remain under-ordered even at kitchens that execute them beautifully. A diner willing to ask what the kitchen is particularly proud of that evening, rather than defaulting to the most familiar items on the menu, often ends up with the most memorable course of the meal.

Building a Broader Habit

For a diner used to defaulting to the nearest sushi counter, the shift toward kappo and robatayaki asks for a small adjustment in expectation — less about a single showcase ingredient, more about a chef’s overall command of fire, knife, and season across an entire meal. It is, in many ways, a more revealing way to judge a Japanese kitchen’s actual skill, and Singapore now has enough serious addresses in this space to make the exploration genuinely worthwhile. For further reading on where the city’s most interesting kitchens are cooking right now, across cuisines, the Dining & Drinks section is a good place to continue.