By Dio Asahi for Eat Drink Asia.
It’s just past noon, and the lifts keep opening.
Suits spill out, lanyards swinging, phones already halfway to their ears. But inside Gochi-So Shokudo, tucked into One Raffles Place, something else is happening. People are sitting down. Actually sitting. Chopsticks lifting, shoulders dropping a little, the room warm with the smell of pork and hot rice.
I take a corner seat and watch a bowl arrive at the next table. Pork belly don. The slices lie over the rice, glossy, still catching the light, and I know without touching mine that the fat is doing its quiet work — sliding down into the grains, softening them, turning plain rice into something that tastes of the meat above it.
When my own bowl comes, I don’t rush it.
The belly is rich, almost sweet at the edges. The rice underneath has gone slick and savoury where the fat has settled. On another day I’ve had the katsu here — that first bite where the crust shatters, then gives way to soft pork beneath, the shredded cabbage cool against it. And the pork jowl, softer still, carrying a faint smoke that lingers past the last mouthful.
None of it is trying to impress me. That’s the essence of Eat Drink Asia.
Because this is CBD lunch, and CBD lunch usually means eating against the clock. A sandwich at the desk. A salad you barely taste. Fuel between meetings. The whole rhythm of office dining is built on speed — on getting food into you and getting you back upstairs.
Gochi-So sits in that same rhythm, and yet it doesn’t quite obey it. The meal is fast enough for a workday. But the pork is cooked with care, the katsu fried to hold its crisp, the belly rendered soft the way it only gets when someone pays attention. Convenience and craft don’t usually sit at the same table. Here, for a lunch hour, they do.
I think that’s why I notice the people more than the plating. The uncle eating alone by the window, unhurried. The two colleagues who’ve stopped talking about work entirely, just eating. For fifteen minutes, the pressure of the day loosens its grip.
There’s nothing rare about tonkatsu. Nothing novel about pork over rice. You’ll find versions of it across the island, across Japan, across a hundred lunch counters. And maybe that’s exactly what deserves noticing — that comfort food doesn’t need reinventing to matter. That a bowl done properly, in a building full of people running late, can be its own small act of kindness.
The rice was hot. The fat had melted just so. Someone had made it well, and I had eaten it slowly, and for a moment the afternoon could wait.
I finished, wiped my hands, and rejoined the lifts.
But I carried the meal with me — not as a photo, not as a place to recommend. Just as the quiet memory of a lunch that asked me to sit down before the day pulled me back up.
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