Sushi Tei, Holland Village, Singapore

So both Aburiya and Raku in Holland Village were closed in the mid-afternoon and I was still feeling like Japanese. Right behind Raku was Sushi Tei. A friend mentioned once that Sushi Tei was one of the better local Japanese chains around, so I decided to give them a shot.

The mixed aburi sushi platter was pretty good. Sure the searing (which wasn't done table-side either) wasn't as even as I would have liked it to be and the tuna wasn't as fatty as I hoped for, but for this price, it's really quite good.

The dragon roll is essentially sushi made out of a whole battered deep-fried king prawn, topped with advocado slices and mayonnaise. The contrast between the butter advocado, soft rice and crisp prawn was rather fun. I'm going to try the phoenix roll the next time I'm here, it looks like another interesting variant of this.

So far things were going pretty good till this came along. The jumbo chicken yakitori certainly lives up to its name of being huge but the sauce was just way too sweet and it wasn't charred as much as I would like it to be. But then again, this isn't a yakitori joint so this was a forgiveable mistake.

The teriyaki beef suffered from the same ailment as the chicken yakitori; the sauce although not as sweet, was still too sweet. At least it was tender and char-grilled a little more and the slivers of garlic were a nice touch.

The tonkatsu is quite decent. In fact, if this was just slightly more juicy and tender, it would come pretty close to Tomton's.

I'm a big fan of unagi and tamago so I just had to order this (I can't remember its name!). It's basically unagi wrapped with tamago. Despite the tamago being not really the best (too rubbery and inconsistent heat from the cooking element resulted in the bubbly and porous texture), I still enjoyed this a fair bit.

Although this may look pretty good, it wasn't really. I made the mistake of being tempted into taking something from the conveyor belt. I normally don't take conveyor belt stuff unless I'm sitting next to the chef and can see that it's prepared fresh. This tasted like it was going around for quite awhile; cold, slightly rancid even, well we all know that things which have been around aren't really that delectable.

Interestingly enough, there were more Japanese people dining here than locals during this mid-afternoon and to give them credit, the food was pretty good. Perhaps some of the bad mouthing I've been hearing about local Japanese chains may just be ostentatious innuendo from self-proclaimed food snobs.

D