The Knife Work at Hanashizuku Japanese Cuisine, Three Floors Above the Noise

By Eda Wong for Eat Drink Asia.

The lift doors open on a floor of Cuppage Plaza that has seen better decades. Peeling signage. A corridor that smells faintly of old carpet and cigarette smoke drifting from somewhere. Then a door slides shut behind me, and the noise falls away.

Inside Hanashizuku Japanese Cuisine, the room is warm and low-lit. The izakaya clatter of the building — the shouting, the beer glasses, the laughter — doesn’t reach here. It’s quiet enough that I can hear the knife.

Chef Steven Lee stands behind the counter, and I take a seat where I can watch. He doesn’t look up much. He has been doing this for twenty-eight years, and it shows in the economy of his hands. No wasted motion. The blade moves through a block of tuna in a single unhurried pull, and the slice falls away clean, thick, its edge catching the light.

The sashimi moriawase arrives without ceremony. Fatty tuna. Salmon. A few seasonal cuts I don’t recognise, arranged simply on the plate. The fish came in from Toyosu, flown over on a rhythm the kitchen keeps but never advertises. You can smell it before you taste it — not fishy, but clean, almost like cold seawater. That smell tells you more than any menu could.

For Eat Drink Asia, this is sashimi at its most honest: Toyosu-fresh cuts that taste like clean seawater.

I take a piece of the tuna. It’s buttery in the way people overuse that word, but here it earns it — soft, giving, dissolving somewhere at the back of the tongue before I’ve decided what to do with it. The salmon is thick, cool, faintly sweet. I slow down. There’s no reason to rush a plate someone spent nearly three decades learning to cut.

What stays with me isn’t the fish, exactly. It’s the quiet. The way a counter like this asks you to pay attention.

There’s a ritual to it that the izakayas outside don’t have. Out there, food is fuel for the evening — loud, communal, fast. Here, it’s something closer to watching. The chef cuts. You eat. Neither of you says much. It’s an old rhythm, and it survives in a corner of a building that doesn’t look like it should hold something so careful.

That’s the part I keep turning over. Hanashizuku sits three floors above a stairwell that hasn’t been renovated in years, in a plaza most people walk past. And inside, a man who has cut fish for twenty-eight years does it the same way he always has, whether the room is full or empty.

There’s a kind of honesty in that mismatch. The setting makes no promises. It doesn’t try to charm you before the food does. Which means the knife has to speak for itself — and it does.

I finish the last slice. Chef Lee is already preparing the next order, the same pull of the blade, the same clean fall of fish.

Outside, the noise waits. In here, for a little while longer, there is only the counter, and the quiet, and the sound of a knife that knows exactly what it’s doing.