You can also view my review on +OpenRice Singapore.
Watami is a casual Japanese restaurant that offer an enjoyable and casual taste of Japanese style food at reasonable prices along with friendly services from their team of servers.
There are 7 outlets in Singapore that spreads from North, South, East West. I personally patronized that outlets at Raffles City and JCube with my boyfriend and family.
For more information, you can check out their website at http://www.watami.com.sg/.
From my experience, their food and service never fail to please us. Going back for more of their variety of food is certainly the thing to do as showing support to them. Had a wonderful dinner last night at JCube outlet with my boyfriend and certainly made the right choice to choose Watami on our date night.
The restaurant is located conveniently at Level 1 near to one of JCube's entrance where Old Town Coffee and Yamazaki Boulangerie. Outside the restaurant, there is this queue machine where you choose the number of people for your table and press for a queue ticket. Of course for us is kinda fast because only the two of us.
You can choose whatever you want in this big red menu they have which we didn't really flip through as we decided to save the hassle and get their Special Set menu at $59 for 2 persons.
From what we can see from the menu, it seems so worthwhile because in total, we will be served with 6 food items + 2 drinks.
The items that we don't need to choose and included in our order will be:
Caesars Salad Half w Hot Spring Egg Half
Yes. It is sinful to have it with sauce but my boyfriend wants that. But I'm wondering if that is sauce or something else. In fact, I thought the egg that will be given is as usual, hard-boiled egg but here, they used soft-boiled egg. I never read carefully actually. So he mixed the salad and I just have it. Actually the taste seems more like sauce than egg. No wonder I don't feel that I'm having any egg when it actually stated there is. Nevertheless, the salad was good and fresh with crunchy sound on every mouthful.
Salmon Sashimi
A total of 6 slices if I'm not wrong and is a must have at Watami. Believe it or not, it is so fresh. See for yourself if you don't believe. Or just head down and have some for lunch.
Agetate Atsuage
This is like any other deep fried tofu. Quite a big slice that is topped with Katsuobushi (or okaka). I wonder why they used that to top this fried tofu but I certainly feel that topping that with Takoyaki is good but not with this fried tofu. And as usual like anywhere, deep fried tofu are crispy on the outside, soft on the inside but taste bland. So I invented my own way of having this tofu.
I dipped it with the soup base (gonna talk about it in the later part). At least in this way, it tastes a little better than bland. Do you feel that it looks like I'm having my favourite Malay food Lontong? I think so, you know? I don't know why I never choose to dip it in light soya sauce. Maybe I don't want to waste the soup base.
So now I'm gonna talk about my Main Dish that we chose. And it is Ebi Tempura Maki which is simply Shrimp Tempura roll.
Actually nothing special though. But we chose to have this is because it has been a long time since we have sushi. This is just to satisfy our craving I guess.
Next, we chose our Hot Pot. And with that, we had Kankoku Butechige with rice. They used the Japanese rice and it has a little sweetness in there. Totally different from what we have for our meals. And yes the maki above, I'm certain it uses Japanese rice too. That is of course!!!
As stated in their menu, it is some Korean style of army hot pot that serves with pork. To be precise, is pork belly. You can see from the photos that there are some many different ingredients used to make up this hot pot. I can find 2 types of mushrooms, pork belly, carrot, potato, mini sausage, small amount of kimchi, tofu, beansprouts, instant noodles, cabbage and one special thing and that is Ddeokbokki aka Korean Stir Fried Rice cake. Amazing right? Can you imagine when the soup is boiled, a variety of flavours come bursting in your mouth? This is definitely worth it. Because it comes with a bowl of rice. They are so thoughtful. Afraid that it is not enough to satisfy a hungry customer, a bowl of rice can do the job. I have no qualms about this hot pot and I definitely recommend to everyone.
And yes... this is the soup that I used to dip that fried tofu. Orange in colour. I got this thinking that the soup base probably is those used for Ddeokbokki. Whatever. I'm just guessing. Have a sip or two of the soup is a must. So tasty. Even when you are chewing away on sausage or whatever inside the pot, the soup just come bursting in your mouth. It makes me feel that every piece of food items here are so juicy. Well done!
The last one will be Side dish and we chose Hotate Butter Yaki which is some grilled scallops with butter. It is either scallops dip in butter before pan frying or just glazing.
It certainly don't look nice in appearance. When it was served up to us, I was sorta disappointment because the scallops were small or should I say it shrinks. With few miserable mushrooms, my first thought was 'Not gonna taste nice. I'm cheated again!' And what surprised me was it actually tasted unexpectedly nice. We never sprinkle with lemon and just have it at its original. The taste is juicy and chewy. Why you surprise me like that? Make me feel so bad. Because I'm judging from appearance, yet again. The buttery taste can be felt through our taste buds. Well done. A must try!
And so let me end this post with my Hot Jasmine Green Tea. Cleanse some oiliness out of our body. I think no matter what, the food we had everyday sure contain oil. So a cup of hot green tea everyday is certainly good for health.
I definitely recommend you peeps to try and I think the reason why you can see long queue and full house has been explained above. But depending on individuals, you may or may not like it. But for me, I certainly do. Enjoy your meal at Watami!