The Cold Soba in a Loud Room

Marina Bay Sands is the hardest address in the city to be taken seriously at.

Not because the restaurants inside it are bad. Several of them are excellent. The problem is the building. The diner arriving at Wakuda has just walked past slot machines, a luxury mall, and a convention centre, and is about to eat inside a resort whose architecture is designed to dissolve attention. Even a serious kitchen has to argue against the spectacle. The room itself is competing with the broader integrated-resort experience for the diner's focus.

Wakuda is the room that has, by my reading, tried hardest to win that argument. The format is a partnership between a Sydney-based Japanese chef and an American hospitality operator who specialises in exactly this kind of marquee-space chef vehicle. The premise is that serious Japanese cooking can be delivered at the scale and polish the address requires, without the cooking becoming the supporting act for the room's hospitality machinery.

A midweek evening is the quieter end of the cycle at Marina Bay Sands. The room reads more clearly once the resort traffic around it has thinned.

The room

Wakuda opened on the seventeenth of April 2022 in the Hotel Tower 2 lobby of Marina Bay Sands at 1 Bayfront Avenue, a partnership between chef Tetsuya Wakuda (the Sydney-based, Japanese-born chef behind Waku Ghin, in the same complex) and John Kunkel's Miami-based 50 Eggs Hospitality. The interior was designed by Rockwell Group, with an up-lit Kumiki wood façade that is the room's signature design moment, alongside provocative artwork commissions from Shohei Otomo, Jun Inoue, and Hiroyasu Tsuri.

The space is large by Singapore fine-dining standards. The interior leans toward the polished marquee aesthetic that the resort's restaurants tend to share: dark wood, soft lighting, expensive-feeling materials, the kind of designed-from-scratch restaurant space that integrated resorts can afford to build in a way standalone operators cannot. The open kitchen is at the back of the room, visible from most tables, with the chef's working area at the centre. The bar is at the front, with a substantial sake and Japanese whisky programme that the room's scale can support.

The seating is a mix of regular tables, a few private dining rooms, and counter seating at the kitchen. The counter is the more interesting choice. It lets the diner watch the cooking the way a smaller kappo or sushi room would. There is also a separate intimate eight-seat private Omakase Room for guests who want the more concentrated experience. That mixed seating is the right calibration for the room's mixed audience. Business diners can have a private room. Casual visitors can have a regular table. Serious diners who want the kitchen-side experience can take the counter or book the Omakase Room.

The Cold Soba

The Cold Soba with Botan shrimp, truffle and Oscietra caviar is the dish that shows most clearly what the partnership is trying to do, and the course that, in a loud room with a lot of competing visual energy, holds its quietness most stubbornly.

The plate arrived in a shallow lacquered bowl. The buckwheat noodles had been chilled in a clean broth, just-set across the bottom of the bowl. The Botan shrimp, raw and deep coral-pink and sweet, sat on top in two pieces. A glossy quenelle of Oscietra caviar was placed at the centre. Shaved black truffle was draped across the construction, the slices thin enough to see the noodles through them. The dressing was minimal, the broth alone with a small amount of soy worked through.

The first bite was the test. The noodles had the right kind of chew that good chilled soba produces, not soft and not gummy, with the faint nutty buckwheat note that the chilling actually preserves better than serving warm does. The broth underneath was clean and marine without being saline. The Botan shrimp tasted of raw shrimp at its best: sweet, dense, with the slight oceanic minerality that the better Japanese shrimp varieties produce. The caviar provided the small saline brine that lifted the dish without dominating it. The truffle was the small earth-and-musk note that pulled the construction together.

The dish is, structurally, a quiet plate. Cold, marine, mineral, restrained. Nothing in it is announcing itself. It is the opposite of the dishes the resort's other restaurants tend to lead with, the ones built around grilled char or a theatrical pour or a wagyu feature. The Cold Soba is the kitchen's argument that a quiet dish can do the work in a loud room, provided the components are perfect.

What surprised me, eating it, was how confident the kitchen was in not embellishing. A more anxious version of this dish would have added a sauce or a garnish or a microherb. The Wakuda version was four ingredients in a bowl, noodles and shrimp and caviar and truffle, with the broth holding it together. That restraint is what the chef is known for, and here it sat in a single plate.

The charcoal-grilled Kagoshima wagyu later in the meal showed the kitchen's louder side: slices of wagyu fanned across a small dab of ponzu sauce, with a piece of charred negi on the side and finishing salt visible on the meat's surface. The wagyu was sourced from one of the more respected Japanese producers, the marbling visible across each slice, the grilling done at the right heat (slight char on the surface, pink at the centre, fat beginning to render but not pooling). The ponzu provided the acid that wagyu of this richness needs. The negi added the charred vegetable note. That dish is the room's signature for a reason, the wagyu programme is genuinely serious. The wagyu is the headline that earns the first visit, but the Cold Soba is where the kitchen shows what it actually believes.

What the format gives and takes

The sake list at Wakuda is, by the restaurant's standards, deep. The selection includes both familiar and more obscure producers, with a strong representation of small-batch breweries that have become important in modern sake culture. The Japanese whisky programme is similarly serious. The wine list is smaller but well-considered. The sommelier service is competent. The pairings across the tasting menu are considered. The pours are correct. That programme is the kind of supporting infrastructure that a marquee Japanese restaurant in a resort can afford to build. Smaller restaurants would not have the volume to justify a sake list of this depth.

The friction with Wakuda is the friction of being a marquee resort restaurant. The room is more crowded than smaller fine-dining spaces. The clientele is more mixed than in a standalone restaurant. The atmosphere is louder than the quietest fine-dining rooms in the city. The integrated resort context is present in the air even when the meal is at the table. A diner looking for the contemplative quiet of a small standalone room will find Wakuda too crowded. A diner who appreciates the scale of a marquee restaurant, the energy and the visible kitchen and the larger crowd, will find Wakuda well-calibrated for that energy. The other friction is the price. Marquee resort restaurants are, in general, expensive. The bill at Wakuda reflects the room's scale, the sourcing, the imported ingredients, and the chef partnership.

Wakuda is one of the more legitimate marquee restaurants in Marina Bay Sands. The chef partnership has produced a real Japanese kitchen rather than a celebrity-chef brand exercise. The cooking has, on the night I ate, justified the marquee positioning. The Cold Soba and the Kagoshima wagyu carry the kitchen's two registers, the quiet one and the louder one. A marquee resort restaurant that has held its kitchen standard against the structural pressures of its location is rare. Wakuda has done it for the duration of its operation, even in the middle of an integrated resort that was, in its broader environment, doing everything in its power to distract the diner from the food.