Shinryoku Yakitori Restaurant

It took me a month to write this review, not that it isn't a great place, but I wasn't willing to brave a longer wait for seats at this tiny little restaurant down Purvis St. But good things are to be shared, so head on down to Shinryoku now for a satisfying buffet!

For those of us who love variety, go for the dinner buffet ($48++ on weekdays, $48++ on weekends). With an extensive menu of over 100 dishes ranging from safe bets (yummy bacon asparagus) to the odd dish (bbq chicken heart anyone?) you can certainly count on filling up and making your money's worth. I'm not a fan of sashimi but fellow diners found the sashimi platter pretty fresh and succulent. My personal favorite is the asparagus covered with a thin layer of bacon, carefully toasted over an open flame, where the bacon fat melts to a crisp....the salmon skin salad is really good too, with the salmon skin fried to a crisp and drenched with a sublime, tangy dressing. Usual Japanese favorites like agedashi tofu, zaru soba, yaki onigiri and the likes are available too.

Before you head down though, do call up and make a reservation to avoid disappointment. Beer lovers will enjoy the $20 per head free flow beer!

Went there on 27th Dec with my chef buddies for a rare night out.
made our reservations for 4, looked forward to a night of catching up and swopping stories. read about their salmon skin salad, and heard it was a under-rated, good value place.

When we were seated and ready to order, 2 of us wanted the buffet, the other 2 only wanted the ala carte. The waitress informed that we had to sit at separate tables, as highlighted in a confusing small print (bad grammar) at the bottom of the menu. No problem, we accommodated that and rearranged ourselves so that the 2 having the buffet would be together, while the 2 pax ala carte would be at the other table and separated ourselves (it was 2 small tables joined together). Being from the F&B, we can understand that the mgt may have concerns about food sharing.

So we waved for service and a senior staff told us to sit FAR apart. We asked politely if they could accommodate us, but she blankly refused, no explanation

We had a short discussion and decided to take our business elsewhere. The restaurant had 3 other tables, 8 pax total. there were about just as many staff as there were customers, and they could have easily explained to us not to share food, keep an eye on us, or check with the chef or owner or the decision maker to let us sit together.

8 covers a night definitely cant cover rent. they lost $180 worth of biz straight away. We are terribly unimpressed with this place... just cant understand their rationale, cos 4 of us agreed that we would have accepted such customers' requests.

I have worked in a place where some diners in the same table, requested to have their mains from an adjacent restaurant and we had to work with the other restaurant's kitchen to make sure that the main courses were served together. or diners would request for a 2nd course from the adjacent restaurant and the staff would need to pick up the food from the other side and serve them.

Definitely a thumbs down. Disappointing

On a mission to eat my way through Singapore's 100 Favourite Dishes (Sunday Times Lifestyle Supplement, 14 Oct), we visited Shinryoku Yakitori at Purvis Street for the fried salmon skin salad recommended by Wong Ah Yoke. I can wax lyrical about the combination of salad leaves - crisp romain lettuce, soft butternut and baby spinach, bitter rocket and chicory, peppery radish and (surprise!) zingy mint leaves; or the superlative salad dressing - rich creamy sesame crossed magically combined with tangy plum sauc; or the amazing - "like-keropok-only-better" crispy salmon skin... but this hardly describes the sensation of having a bit of everything all at once doing a merry dance in your mouth.... but i am getting ahead of myself. Let's do this review properly.

Shinryoku is a charming cosy 18 seater restaurant at Purvis Street, staffed by a friendly (albeit a little inexperienced) crew. Like yakitori restaurants in Japan, an extensive yakitori menu handwritten in Japaneses adorns the walls. True to yakitori culture in Japan, the dishes at Shinryoku are timed so that one item is served at a time by the diligent staff. Except that given the number of yakitori dishes we ordered, we'd still be there in the early hours of the morning if we waited for each to be served in turn. So we ordered the kitchen to "hit us with it". And they did!

We had (in order of "favourites" rated from 1 to 10 in a straw poll taken by our party of 6 greedy girls) - prawns with shiso leaves wrapped in bacon (10), pork belly with leeks and garlic (10), cripsy pork (10), grilled squid (10), asparagus with miso (8), chicken yakitoro (8), quail's eggs (7), chicken skin (7), shitake mushrooms (6)... I am sure we had more but my fingers got too sticky to hold a pen for notes. Every item was evenly grilled and imbued with a smoky char grilled flavour without overpowering the individual flavours of the meat or vegetables.

The king prawn deserves a special mention - it is superb. Firm sweet prawns is wrapped in crispy bacon and grilled to smoky perfection. The sharp distinctive taste of shiso leaves adds a tantalising kick. The grilled squid was also especially good. I mention it here because it is so easy to overcook squid and you end up with chewy rubber tasting of nothing else but the sweet sauce it is drenched in. The squid served by Shinryoku was excellent; crusty on the surface and tender yet springy to the bite. It is served with brown wata miso sauce, clearly made from the squid itself as we could taste the squidy saltiness in each bite.

As for the salmon skin salad, I must give WAY his due for so kindly sharing his find with the Sunday Times readers; so quoting the gourmand himself "This is a salad to savour... all salads should be this good"