The grill glows orange in front of me before the meat arrives. It’s a small thing, set into the counter at my single seat, and it hums faintly under the chatter of the room. No flame. No charcoal. Just a low electric warmth I can feel rising toward my face.
A plate comes. Thin slices of beef, laid out like pages — tongue, skirt steak, short plate — each one marbled with fine threads of fat. I pick up a slice with the tongs and lay it on the grill. It takes a second. Then the sizzle starts, quiet at first, building as the fat begins to render. The smell reaches me a beat later — that deep, toasted beef aroma that always seems to arrive before the taste does.
This is Yakiniku Like, tucked into the busy stretch near Somerset MRT Station, where Orchard Road moves fast and nobody lingers long. The counter is built for people like me, eating alone. One seat, one grill, one plate. You cook your own meat at your own pace, and nobody hurries you, though the room is moving quickly all around.
The grill is the thing I keep thinking about. Yakiniku has always been a shared act — a charcoal pit in the middle of a table, smoke curling up into everyone’s clothes, friends reaching over each other to turn the meat. It’s one of those rituals that makes Japanese food feel communal before you’ve even taken a bite. The smoke was part of it. You carried it home in your hair. Here, the electric grill takes that away. It’s smokeless, clean, efficient. I’ll step back onto Orchard Road in a few minutes and smell of nothing at all.
There’s something quietly strange about that. The whole ritual of yakiniku was built around company, around the slow shared work of grilling and talking. Now it’s been folded down into a single seat, a single grill, a meal you can finish in twenty minutes between errands. The intimacy hasn’t vanished. It’s just turned inward. Instead of cooking for the table, I’m cooking only for myself, paying attention to one slice at a time, deciding when it’s done by the colour of the edge.
I lift the skirt steak off the moment it curls. It’s still soft in the middle, the fat gone glassy. I dip it, eat it, reach for the next. There’s a rhythm to it that I didn’t expect to find alone — a small, contained focus, the kind you don’t usually get in a place this close to a mall.
Maybe that’s the trade. We’ve given up the smoke and the crowd for speed and a clean shirt. Something is lost in that. But something is also offered back: a quiet half-hour, a grill that asks nothing of you except attention, a meal that belongs entirely to you.
I finish the last slice and watch the grill dim. The room keeps moving. I sit a moment longer than I need to, in no hurry to rejoin it.
Best Sushi Singapore: From Premium Japanese Restaurants to Exclusive Deals from Affordable Sushi Trains
Dio Asahi | September 15, 2026
I’ve been eating sushi in this city for years now, from S$1.50 plates rolling past on a belt to omakase counters where the bill made me sit up straight. Somewhere along the way I stopped chasing “the best” and started noticing something else — that good sushi answers a mood, not a ranking. Some nights…
-
Al Mubin Restaurant and the Nasi Goreng Sambal Ayam That Has to Carry the Whole Plate
Eda Wong | September 12, 2026
It was close to eleven at night when I finally sat down. The kind of hour when you’re not really hungry so much as unsettled, when you want something warm in front of you more than you want a proper meal. Al Mubin’s food court at Block 407, Ang Mo Kio Avenue 10, was still…
-
Yassin Kampung Admiralty Review: When Sambal Fried Rice Becomes the Whole Point
Eat Drink Asia Team | September 10, 2026
I ordered the sambal fried rice first, before I’d even properly read the menu. That’s usually a mistake at a place like this. Yassin Kampung @ Admiralty is the kind of restaurant that keeps trying to pull your attention elsewhere — toward stingray, toward crab, toward hotplates that arrive still hissing. But I’d come with…
-
The Bamboo Basket Holding Chiang Mai’s Sticky Rice
Dio Asahi | September 9, 2026
By Dio Asahi for Eat Drink Asia. The lid comes off, and the steam rises first. It’s a warm afternoon in Chiang Mai, and on the table sits a small woven bamboo basket, still holding the heat of the pot it came from. Someone’s grandmother lifts the top and sets it aside without looking. Inside,…
-
Sambal Fried Rice Recipe for People Who Know the Chilli Paste Does the Heavy Lifting
Dio Asahi | September 8, 2026
I used to add the rice too early. The oil would be hot, the sambal barely a minute in, and I’d tip in the cold rice because I was hungry and impatient. Every time, the same result: rice stained red but tasting of nothing much. Sharp. Raw. Flat where it should have been deep. It…
-
Hup Lok at Havelock Road: A Teochew Fish Soup Carrying Memory Forward
Eda Wong | September 8, 2026
The bowl arrives before anything else does. Steam lifts off it in slow ribbons, carrying the smell of ginger and something warmer underneath: the round, boozy note of hua tiao wine settling into fish. I lean in before I even pick up my spoon. The broth is pale gold and cloudy, thick enough that it…
-
Fresh Sashimi Singapore: Places for Clean Cuts, Quiet Counters, and Fish That Still Feels Alive
Eda Wong | September 5, 2026
I didn’t grow up eating raw fish. For years, sashimi felt like something you learned to appreciate rather than something you loved. Cold, foreign, a little intimidating. Then one afternoon, at a quiet counter, a chef placed a single slice of chutoro in front of me and said nothing. I ate it. And I understood….
-
Pattaya Garden Restaurant and the Thai Meal That Knows How to Feed a Group
Eat Drink Asia Team | September 3, 2026
The rice came down first. A plain bowl, warm and steaming, set in the middle of the table before anything else. Then the green curry, in a bowl wide enough for four spoons to reach at once. And within a minute the table stopped being a set of individual meals and became one shared thing,…
-
At Keria Japanese Restaurant, the Meal Begins Before the First Bite
Dio Asahi | September 3, 2026
By Dio Asahi for Eat Drink Asia. The lift opens onto a corridor leading to the famed and hidden Cuppage Plaza food, and the building’s age shows in the flickering fluorescent light and the smell of old carpet. Then a sliding door pulls back, and Keria Japanese Restaurant asks you to slow down. Inside, it…
-
The Round Kaya Bun at Chin Mee Chin Confectionery, and the Mornings It Keeps
Eda Wong | September 2, 2026
By Eda Wong for Eat Drink Asia. It’s not quite eight, and the pastel-blue shophouse is already awake. Kopi cups clink against saucers. A ceiling fan turns slow overhead. Someone folds a newspaper at a marble-topped table, and the man behind the counter moves without hurry, sliding buns across in a rhythm he’s clearly done…
