Thursday, August 30, 2007

Honjin Japanese Restaurant

Went with Zf to Honjin tonight. Honjin is situated in Chow House on Robinson Road, a 5 minute walk away from exit F of Tanjong Pagar MRT station. They are having a 1-for-1 offer on their Hotate Buffet for DBS cardmembers, applicable for dinner every day and lunch on Saturdays and Sundays. Price is 52++ and comes up to about 31 per person. It's amazingly ex considering you're only supposed to be paying half the price, but half the price is still cheaper than Hanabi weekday lunch heh.


If you're interested to find out more, can check out their website here. The menu is also posted on the website, along with the opening hours and contact number if you want to make reservations.

Overall I thought this buffet was quite a bit less satisfactory than the Hanabi buffet, though in some ways it has its good points. It may take me a while to elaborate, so bear with me.


First up, the sashimi platter, that must-order indicator of a restaurant's quality. The sashimi variety isn't as wide as that of Hanabi, with only four items: salmon, tuna, hamachi (yellowtail) and octopus. The fish is fresh and quite enjoyable, though the slices are a bit thick, not that the thickness really bothered me very much. Somehow the sashimi is let down by the rather bland shoyu that the restaurant stocks - aside from the initial saltiness on placing the sashimi dabbed in shoyu into the mouth, there's no lasting fragrance or added flavour, and it doesn't complement the fish very well. Zf complained that his wasabi melted too fast - it completely disintegrated and was lost in the shoyu within minutes, but I don't really go for lots of wasabi so I'm fine with that. We only had one sashimi platter as I decided I wasn't going to devour multiple platters and give up stomach space I could devote to trying other new things. Anyway, it wasn't as if the sashimi was mind-blowingly good.


Other standard dishes were quite average and tasty. The vegetable pot (yasai nabe) was something new for me because I've never tried a kaminabe (that's a pot lined with paper) dish before. Zf had the cold ramen (hiyashi ramen), and I tried a mouthful of the ramen - springy and light with hints of the cold dipping sauce, but the sauce tasted a bit dilute for my liking as well. Teppanyaki dishes - Zf had the beef, I had pepper chicken, and we shared beansprouts - tasted much better than they looked, flavourful and fragrant with the heat of the teppan :P. The saba shioyaki was rather disappointing compared to the delightful Hanabi version which I devoured multiple pieces of - the Honjin saba just tasted like rather mediocre fish without much to blow the mind away. It was simply salty and nothing else. The unagi was yummy, though I've never been a great fan of unagi.


Near the beginning of the meal they brought us this huge fish head and said it was a complimentary dish for us to try, so I gleefully accepted it, being rather greedily Singaporean. It's a salmon fish head, grilled I think, with lemon and grated radish garnish by the side. This was possibly the best dish of the entire night - the salmon was not the least bit fishy (I find that salmon often tends to have a rather strong smell especially with the skin but the skin of this head had no smell), and was wonderfully soft and sweet, melting in the mouth. Somehow Zf was rather offended by the way the head looked and didn't want to eat much of the fish after trying some, so I practically stripped the entire head of the yummy fish heh. I was musing that they probably gave us the head because 1) they saw me taking pictures; and 2) we were dressed quite formally. Bet you they wouldn't be as nice if we were in T-shirts and shorts.


One of the gripes we had with the buffet was the fact that everything came in such small portions. The tempura prawns and soft-shell crab were quite small and we ordered multiple servings because we couldn't get enough of them; they were quite well done and delicious. We asked for a mixed platter of tempura, but for some reason they sent us the vegetables individually at different times, probably because the chef was frying huge batches of vegetables separately, so no nice picture of a tempura platter.


I think the tonkatsu was nearly the last straw when it came and there were just two miserably tiny slices of pork cutlet lying on the plate that seemed too large for the serving and only made the slices seem even smaller. The two of us looked at the tonkatsu in horror and then dismay and started laughing uncontrollably at how ridiculously small the serving was. We even took a photo of the beautiful picture of the tonkatsu on the menu to demonstrate the vast difference between truth and what we are led to believe. That was, after 3 minutes of mad laughter subsided.


The soft-shell crab and salmon maki were both of quite good standard and we ordered a second serving which never came, not that we were complaining by the end of the meal. The Californian temaki which I had looked a little sparse and sad but was actually quite delicious, so that's another reason why we shouldn't judge a book by its cover. The croquette was disappointing as the potato inside was so fluid that it was more like a crispy skin stuffed with mashed potato. The agedashi tofu was also not that great - I found the skin to be too rubbery and thick.


We finished off the meal with dessert - ice-cream, extremely standard and not special, just a simple scoop of ice-cream in a simple cup. Didn't take a picture of it, but took a picture of our cleared table with just my cup of tea in the centre - looks rather Zen, haha. And then I was philosophising to Zf that tea is quite important because it washes the food down, and Japanese as well as Chinese tea actually aids digestion, I find, unless you drink so much of it you get all bloated.


Okay, so my review of the place: Food quality ranges from average to above-average depending on what you get, and while most of the dishes don't look very nicely presented the taste is often better than you expect for the appearance; definitely loses out to Hanabi in terms of pretty presentation. The small-servings policy is actually quite nice at the end of the day because you get to try a little morsel of everything, leaving you enough space to try a lot of things on the menu instead of wasting your stomach space on too much of each item. Certainly it's frustrating if you really like the dish and you only get a tiny bit that is hardly satisfactory, but you can always order more. The ambience is a little cheesy, with all the lanterns and rather harsh lighting, and we even found ants crawling on the walls; I'm rather surprised at the prices they are charging frankly - even on their usual menu the food is quite pricey for Japanese restaurant standards, and the food isn't so great that it deserves that price anyway.


Further spoiling the mood is the fact that the waitresses push around this trolley collecting the dishes, which brings the level of the restaurant rather close to that of a food court, heh. I cringed every time I saw the trolley roll by with its garish blue basins filled with dishes.

If Hanabi is 8 stars, Honjin is probably 5.5 to 6 stars. Not too bad, probably can try if you are a DBS cardmember. It's probably not very fair of me to keep comparing it to Hanabi, but well I've been spoilt.

Avaris / 8/30/2007 11:30:00 PM

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