Sizzling Missiles of Meat

Iwashi (鰯) is coming into season as we speak. Even though it sounds like an exotic Japanese fish that is seldom available at your run of the mill Japanese restaurants or kaiten sushi places, we are sure that almost of you readers have, at some point in life, eaten Iwashi, because it is non other than the humble sardine. 


In our case, we have Ma-iwashi or Sardinops melanostictus (真鰯) in the restaurant. It's also known as the Japanese Sardine or Spotted Sardine. We don't think it's necessary to describe what a sardine looks like but most people are surprised by how big the fresh ones are with head and all. It's still not much flesh to go around but worth every bit. It's one of our favorite fish for sashimi. You will be wondering right now if we are crazy to serve sardines raw?!? Trust us, it's the best way to enjoy this soft and fatty fish. It's stronger and oilier tasting than Aji but the flesh has a creamy texture that is found in no other fish. Sashimi is the only way to appreciate the texture and flavour together with the slight grittiness of the small bones left in the meat. Most restaurants avoid serving this because of the image of it being a cheap canned protein to supplement instant noodles in the late of the night, but also because it is a highly labour intensive to prepare. The chef must pin bone this fish after filleting and it a very tedious process for your maximum enjoyment. 

Sorry to everybody who reads these blogs. It's mean a month since we had a posting and the excuse is that we have been really really busy. We simply do not have the time to write anything interesting, unless you want to know about all the boring and mundane stuff about running a restaurant. It is about time to do a more educational post so we promise it will be for the next post, soon.


Anyway, the restaurant has been in business for coming to 2 months and things are going great! We have lots to complain and gripe about but it's better than expected. No, we are not raking in the cash but things have been relatively smooth. The bad news is that the lights above the charcoal grill keep burning out because of the heat. We are going through a set of bulbs per week! The wires have been changed to heat resistants ones but the lifespan of the bulbs are drastically reduced by the charcoal fire. The door to the kitchen has been removed because the spring hinges just couldn't keep up with us. Lousy quality crap. Going to have it replaced this week.


Good news is that we have repeat and regular customers! That's the best affirmation and testimony to the great quality of our food that we serve at the izakaya. We really couldn't ask for more. We are not in the green yet but we will soldier on.


Speaking of soldiering on, it is time to submit GST plus year closing and boy do we have a ton of paperwork to get through. The first filing is always the worst because it's the first time and also because it  also has the most invoices because of the startup.


Stay tuned for the next update. We'll let you know through Facebook, which by the way has some really nice photos that we took.

It will be our first month in operation this week and things are going as they should-ish. We have been testing the grill on and off, so far so good. We will raise the height of the grill maybe an inch or two to reduce the smoke escaping out to zero. The problem is we really hate the grill! It is the root of all grief in the shop but yet it will be able to create delicious food. We had a short-circuit last Sunday caused by the grill. You must be wondering how can a charcoal grill mess with the electrics. It turns out that the temperature in the exhaust hood was high enough to damage the wires for the light fixtures above the grill. The insulation was toast and there was a short circuit. It went so far as to damage our main circuit breakers resulting in the whole shop losing power. Needless to say, we did ZERO business that day. It really isn't about the loss of sales that bugs us, after all it is just one day out of the hundreds or maybe thousands that we will be here for. What was horrible was the fact that we disappointed and failed our customers. Eight were seated and ready to place their order when it tripped. They left hungry. A few more came repeat customers came by but had to be turned away. Some were kind enough to want to wait for the power to be fixed but we really couldn't guarantee that things will be OK before they starved to death. That sucks! we have decided to refer to the grill as The Bitch.

The title sounds severe but it really is a bit of a milestone for a small izakaya. It has been a pretty rough start with many issues that has been dealt with or needs further fine tuning.

If anyone reading this wishes to try their hand in kushiyaki or sumibiyaki, our advise is don't. Don't even think about it. If you are dead set on it, then go see a psychiatrist because you are clinically insane or just jump off a roof and save the trouble. It really is that bad. The grill and the logistic for the grill is no end of pain. The amount of labour involved in the preparation of the skewers, the cost of the specialist chef, ingredients, storage and the low selling price, almost means that we are making a lost for every skewer sold. That's not including all the time, money and effort spent on oversizing the exhaust system solely for the charcoal grill.

We faced excessive smoke from the grill when we first tried the grill out and have since gone for a larger fan. In fact, we run two fans. A dedicated fan just for the grill. That helped but didn't solve the problem when we fired it up again, so we added glass surround for the exhaust hood to concentrate the suction. That again helped but didn't totally solve the problem. We and the engineers were perplexed because on paper, that would have been more than sufficient. After much head scratching, we figured there must be some kind of obstruction in the common exhaust ducting that we share with the other restaurants. Being the last on the grid, it's kinda shitty, because our exhaust gases face more resistance and travel further before being discharged. It turns out that our 'friendly' neighbour restaurant has made some of their own well-hidden modification to their duct, basically occluding it to such a point leaving us only about 15% of the duct cross section. This is so that they can get better flow for their exhaust but selfish behavior. At that point, we had a atherosclerotic duct-esclerotic plaque on our hands. If left untreated, it will lead to unstable fangina or even congestive fan failure. We had to act fast. The skilled engineers pulled out the obstruction, stented the duct and flow was restored. No more smoke in the shop! Day saved and beer was passed round. Tenza 1; Neighbour 0. They were not happy campers and now have a smokey kitchen but couldn't do much. We think they should stop being cheap and get a proper exhaust fan like everyone else.

Still on the charcoal grill, we won't be able to start serving grilled items and probably won't be until well into next month. Reason being, labour shortage. We just can't get enough Singaporeans or PRs to work in this industry but we are not able to employ foreign workers yet. Same problem with service side of things, so we are making do with part-timers but that is a compromise in service quality that we are unhappy about. Having said that, the part-timers we get, all from Ngee Ann Polytechnic, are a young and cheerful lot. They are eager to learn and willing to work hard. Great attitude. We just wished that we had more time to train them. In the mean time, we are sitting this out and trying our best to hire.

The fish display cabinet, being a custom design, also went through some trial and error. If we had a chance to do it again, we wouldn't have gone for a top opening design. It takes up too much valuable space in a small izakaya and is not the must practical thing for the chef also. This is not a big issue but it bugs us a little. Maybe we'll change it out next year.

Mostly friends dropping by for meals for now but we have quite a decent walk-in crowd too. We even have repeats! We've sold about 20 bottles of sake so far. We are not complaining. Obviously the daily sales is no where near the daily margin for break even but it's been less than a month and we haven't done much marketing.

We still need to get past the human resource hurdle before we are free to sprint on. Things are more or less on track except for the grill. We can only seek your understanding as to why we really are not able to serve grilled items even until now.

It's been nearly two weekends since the opening of the our izakaya last tuesday on the 11th May. We have sold a bit of sake but didn't realise that we have a nice spot above the mirror where we can keep the empty bottles as decoration until a week ago. Unfortunately, because of our lack of experience, we have discarded about half of what we had.

Spring is also Sansai (山菜) season. Sansai can be literally translated as mountain vegetables. It's not necessarily wild as most of it are farmed but they usually have different requirements from other table vegetables and more often than not tend to be seasonal. What sets sansai apart from yasai is the taste. Sansai should taste like spring; clean and fresh. When you enjoy a piece of sansai, it should feel like taking a deep breathe of clear, spring mountain air. 


Sansai is not one plant but a collection of seasonal plants. Currently we have fuki no to, taro no me, kogomi and fuki in the restaurant, with more varieties to come soon. Sansai was once exclusive to high end japanese establishments but we are now bringing it to you at an accessible price and location.

We first tried out the POS, kitchen and charcoal grill last saturday amongst some 'guinea friends' to do a full shake down of the restaurant. The goal from the onset was less about the food but more about checking the water-tightness of our systems, processes and equipment. We can proudly declare that saturday was a successful failure. Everything was a mess and that was good. Through that night of severe beating we managed to find many faults that must be rectified before the restaurant can be better.

Some of the things we discovered:

1. Kitchen exhaust was not strong enough for the charcoal grill.
2. Charcoal grill design flaw resulting in warp and difficulty in controlling heat.
3. POS bugs and errors.
4. Kitchen needs more storage space.
5. Work flow issues.
6. Restaurant layout needs improvement.
7. Counter seating problems.