Cuisine: Japanese
Address: 1 Tras Link, #01-18, Singapore 078867
Nearest MRT: Tanjong Pagar (East-West line)

Teppei Japanese restaurant is a cozy restaurant located in Tanjong Pagar. It serves up a tasty omakase menu, which is the Japanese tradition of letting a chef choose your order. The word means “I will leave it to you.” It is a fine tradition that gives the chef creative freedom and the customer a memorable dining experience.

Being a small restaurant, it can only seat up to 12 diners for dinner, so the seats are sold out very quickly. Every first Saturday of the month at 9am, the booking system will refresh the number of seats for the following month. By the time I logged in half an hour after the start, all the weekend options were taken, only leaving me with the weekday dinners. So we chose to have dinner on a Wednesday evening, at 8.30pm. The earlier seating at 6.30pm was also sold out. The menu at Teppei changes every month.

The restaurant does not accept walk-ins. After making a confirmation, a $100 per person deposit is charged to your credit card, in case of no show, it will be charged to the credit card on the day of the reservation.

For starters, we had cold pumpkin soup. The soup was rich in taste and not too creamy, we could taste the pumpkin bits. Next was the cheese topped mackerel, which I enjoyed but my friends found the taste of the cheese to be too strong. A standard dish at Japanese restaurants is the chawanmushi (egg custard dish with savoury ingredients). Teppei takes it one step further by topping the chawanmushi with foie gras sauce and it had two types of mushrooms in it. And lastly, we had a small sashimi platter with different kinds of raw fish, placed on an ice bowl and garnished with sea salt flower that is edible.

In between, we were given one piece of ebi tempura. The prawn was lightly battered and dipped in the radish sauce. Along the way, the chef would advise us on how to eat the food, which is a welcome advice as we may not know the sequence.

The next set of dishes served were also equally appetising. There was Hiroshima oyster with konnyaku jelly, providing it with a sweet and sour taste. Konnyaku jelly is made from the konjac plant. The oyster was so fresh that it literally melted in my mouth.

This was followed by the wagyu beef maki with special sauce. The beef was done to perfection and we saw how the chef painstakingly rolled it into a sushi. The wagyu steak with mushroom confit and lotus root chip was served next. The beef was slightly chewy and the brown sauce was the secret ingredient to making it taste so yummy. Then came the salmon confit with miso sauce, but it was a miss. The slice of salmon was too thick, not like your typical sashimi slice, and the way it was not seared was not enough so it still had quite a raw taste. The bits of ikra burst in your mouth but the miso sauce was not very outstanding.

The chef ensured that you had finished each dish before serving the next small plate. It depends on your group of diners, so usually it would be served three by three. The minced tuna roll with crispy bits was next. The crispy bits of fried shallot provided a nice crunch to the sushi. We had the whole roll for each person, probably for us to load up on the carbs.

While waiting for the chef to prepare the next dish, there were various small bites in between, such as persimmon, cheese potato, fried yam and grape dipped in wine sauce. All these helped to cleanse the palate.

These petite samplers are lobster with Hokkaido sea urchin. The lobster was springy and the uni was heavenly, especially for those who know how to enjoy their uni. It was pop in the mouth and savour the creamy consistency of the uni together with the springy lobster flesh. By then, we were almost 80% full from all these small dishes.

For the final main course, we were given a menu and told to choose one of the above. Among the 3 of us, we decided on the Ikura & crab uni don, Wagyu beef fried rice and the Unagi porridge.

The Unagi porridge was like having dashi stock poured over the unagi rice. This soup base was slightly salty, and the unagi slices still had the terriyaki sauce on it, so it retained its taste. This dish is suitable for people feeling under the weather, as the broth mixed with rice gives a flavourful soupy delight.

You can’t see the rice on this dish as it is skilfully covered by the abundant crab meat, sea urchin and roe (Ikura and Crab Uni don). It was so delicious, especially the dollop of uni that all 3 of us could not get enough.

Why is there a candle? This is Teppei’s way of celebrating your birthday. They switch off the lights in the restaurant and the chef dons a wig, and the staff burst out in a birthday song enthusiastically. I was hoping for a birthday shot of sake but that did not materialise. This is the Wagyu beef fried rice, served on a hot plate. I enjoyed both the seasoned slices of tender wagyu beef and the fragrant garlic fried rice.

Lastly, for dessert, we were served a scoop of ice cream. There were several flavours we could choose from, such as black sesame, green tea, salted caramel, yuzu etc. The ice cream melted easily as it was probably made in-house, without the use of much stabilisers and preservatives. The staff offered us second or third servings of ice cream too.

Overall, I enjoyed my first ever omakase experience at Teppei. The staff were friendly, from the waiters who topped up our tea to the chefs serving us our little dishes. I wish the tea was served in a proper ceramic cup instead of the plastic cup as it spoils the ambience. If the plates for the dishes can be served in ceramic, so should the cup. With a total of 15 dishes to try out and some small slices of fruit in between, this omakase set at $100++ per person is really value-for-money. I also enjoyed the antics of the staff when they decided to spring a birthday surprise for the customers.