The Shari That Moved Rooms

The thing to taste at Sushi Sakuta is the rice.

That is the right instinct at any serious Edomae counter, where the shari is the chef's signature and the fish is the season's, but it is the specific instinct at Sakuta, because the chef builds his rice from a blend of two red and two white vinegars over a mix of Hitomebore and Sasanishiki. The result has more acidic depth and more savoury backbone than the lighter, sweeter rice most of the city's sushi counters serve. The rice is the reason the counter is worth evaluating, and it is also the reason the counter's late-2025 relocation is the more interesting story.

Sakuta moved in late 2025 from the Capitol Kempinski to a unit at Millenia Walk on Raffles Boulevard. On paper that is a downgrade, a grand hotel address traded for a mall floor. A relocation is the most revealing moment to evaluate a sushi-ya, because the counter is so much of what the room is: the hinoki, the chef's relationship to the small space, the exact distance between his hands and the diner's plate. The question with any sushi relocation is whether the thing that made the original counter work transfers. At Sakuta, the thing that makes the counter work is the shari, and the shari came through the move completely intact.

The move, on the evidence of the meal, was a chef choosing control over prestige.

A room calibrated for concentration

The new space is Sukiya-minimalist: pale hinoki, shoji screens, the deliberate emptiness a serious sushi counter uses to keep the diner's attention on the chef's hands. Ten seats at the main counter, a six-seat private room off to the side. The mall outside disappears the moment the door closes.

That emptiness is what the relocation bought. A grand hotel dining room comes with grandeur the chef does not control, the lobby, the corridor, the brand's calibrated lighting, the prestige the diner is partly paying for. A mall unit comes with none of that, which means the chef builds the room himself. Sakuta has built a room calibrated for concentration rather than for grandeur. The lighting holds the counter. The shoji screens close the space. The chef works quietly behind the counter, and the diner's attention has nowhere to go except his hands.

That calibration is the right one for the cuisine. Edomae sushi is a counter art, the pieces built one at a time, placed in front of the diner at the moment they are ready, the next one shaped while the previous is eaten. A room that competes with the counter for the diner's attention works against the cuisine. The Millenia Walk room does not compete. It vanishes, which is what a sushi room is supposed to do.

The bafun uni, and where the rice lands

The shari is best read across the whole sequence, but the bafun uni nigiri was where it landed clearest.

The piece arrived with the uni's sweetness and oceanic richness sitting on the rice. The first thing was the temperature, the shari at body warmth, the uni cool, the contrast deliberate rather than accidental. The first bite was the test. The four-vinegar shari did the structural work: the acidity cut the uni's fat, the red-vinegar depth grounded the sweetness so the piece did not collapse into pure richness, the rice's body held against the soft neta without going to mush. The uni was the season's best, dense and sweet and oceanic, but the rice was the reason the piece worked as sushi rather than as a spoonful of uni on a rice base.

That is the distinction the shari makes. A lighter, sweeter rice, the kind most of the city's counters serve, would have amplified the uni's sweetness and produced a piece that read as dessert-adjacent. Sakuta's four-vinegar shari pulled in the other direction. The acidity and the savoury backbone gave the piece tension. The uni's richness had something to push against. By the time I had eaten it, the rice had done more work than the uni, which is the inversion a serious Edomae chef is working toward.

The same rice ran under all ten nigiri. The Japanese tiger prawn, sweet and dense and just-cooked, sat on the same acidic shari and gained the same tension. The leaner fish gained body from the rice; the richer fish gained cut. The shari was the constant, and the constant was the chef's signature.

Where the kitchen demonstrates rather than lands

The braised Chiba abalone, among the appetisers, was the one course where the technique slightly exceeded the eating.

The abalone had been braised long and was correctly tender, the slow braise doing the work that abalone requires, the liver sauce properly made and bitter-savoury in the right register. It was a competent course. It was also the course that read more as a demonstration of the kitchen's braising patience than as a plate that landed with the immediacy the nigiri carried. The nigiri sequence is built on tension: the rice against the fish, the temperature contrast, the single decisive bite. The braised abalone was softer, slower, more about the kitchen showing its patience than about the diner's plate doing something immediate.

Not a fail. A small lull in an otherwise tightly built meal. The appetiser sequence is where the kitchen has room to demonstrate, and the abalone used the room. The nigiri never did; every piece in the sushi sequence was tension rather than demonstration, which is where the counter is at its strongest.

A diner who comes for the nigiri and treats the appetisers as the warm-up has read the meal correctly. The rice is what you come for, and the braise is what you eat on the way to it.

The friction

The friction with Sakuta is the friction the relocation produced.

The pricing is at the top of the city's omakase band, and the mall address does not soften it. The diner is paying counter prices in a Millenia Walk unit, which can read as a mismatch to anyone who associates the spend with the grandeur of a hotel dining room. The room is more controlled than a hotel room; it is also less prestigious, and the bill does not adjust for the difference. A diner paying for the address rather than the rice will feel the mismatch.

The other friction is the category. The city has many high-end Edomae counters, and the distinctiveness at Sakuta lives in the shari rather than in the room or the sourcing or the theatre. A diner who reads rice will find the four-vinegar shari genuinely distinct. A diner who does not read rice, who evaluates the counter on the fish, the room, the prestige, may not find Sakuta distinct from the field. The room rewards the sushi-literate diner and is merely competent to everyone else.

What the counter is for

Sakuta is one of the rare sushi-ya in Singapore where a relocation improved the room rather than diminishing it. The shari is the chef's signature, and the four-vinegar blend gives the rice a savoury, acidic depth that most of the city's sweeter shari lacks. The new room is more controlled than the grand hotel space it replaced. The move traded prestige for control, and the control reads on the counter.

The bafun uni nigiri, the season's best uni sitting on body-warm four-vinegar shari, was the single piece where the chef's rice and the season's fish met exactly. A sushi chef who decided his rice mattered more than his address, and moved rooms to get a counter he could control rather than a hotel name he could not, has made the more interesting choice. The room changed, and the rice carried over without losing anything that mattered.

The shari survived the move, and the room it landed in suits the cooking better than the hotel floor it left behind.