Cuisine: Japanese

Address: 68 Orchard Rd, Singapore 238839

Opening hours: 11.30am – 9.30pm

Nearest MRT: Dhoby Gaut station (North-South, Northeast and Circle lines)

Tamoya was opened by a Japanese chef who had his humble beginnings back in 1996 where he operated an udon stand in Tokyo. 6 years later it became a proper restaurant. At a reality udon competition TV programme, the chef had a chance to participate in it. Through the show, he managed to expand his business to Tokyo and beyond, opening up new restaurants around the world to promote the Sanuki taste to foreigners.

Today, this udon restaurant has a small shop at Plaza Singapura, the first outlet to be opened here. The shop actually existed at Liang Court until Jan 2020, then it moved to its current premises. It is located at the sixth floor of Plaza Singapura, beside the Kopitiam food court.

Tamoya Udon is most well known for their, well, udon which is made with three different types of flour, and served in a dashi broth. The udon served at Tamoya Udon are handmade daily with no preservatives added.

Long queues are seen at the store everyday, be it during the office lunchtime crowd or for dinner. Being an affordable Japanese restaurant in the shopping mall compared to Ichiban boshi or Ajisen, it is no wonder that Tamoya Udon & Tempura attracts the crowd. The concept of the store is self-service. Customers place their order at the counter, make payment, help themselves to the utensils and condiments, then go back to their table to enjoy the meal. It works like the Ikea food section with the self-checkout and diners have to return their own trays. It is an effective idea to get people to be more considerate and return their trays of food. In this way, no service charge is levied for the food.

The kitsune set cost $9.80 but today the oden was sold out so they only had the ala carte version of kitsune ($7.80). To add on the ingredients, we had a tempura crabstick ($1.20), prawn ($2) and shitake mushroom ($1.20). Different items on the tempura menu had different prices. Diners could help themselves to the freshly fried tempura and the cashier will add up the prices on their tray.

The udon was thick and slurpy, soaking up the curry sauce well. With an onsen egg with a runny yolk and a generous serving of sliced beef, I ate to my heart’s content.

For me, I had the beef onsen egg curry udon ($11.60) as I liked a thicker and more flavourful sauce. While the soup base is tasty, but I don’t usually finish the soup when I order ramen or udon. So a curry sauce where I can slurp up the delicious udon noodles is more suited for my liking.

As you can see, there is a wide selection of tempura. If the tempura item is out of stock, you should inform the cashier of the order and may payment first. Then one of the staff members will bring the tempura to your table. At the end of the meal, diners are expected to return their tray of food to the return counter, as reminded by the staff.

After dinner, we headed over to Nana’s green tea for deserts. The matcha warabimochi parfait costs even more than our main course – $13.90. We shared one between the two of us.