The Same Grill, Three Decades On, at Kazu Sumiyaki Restaurant

By Dio Asahi for Eat Drink Asia.

The lift opens on the fourth floor of Cuppage Plaza and the smoke finds me before the door does. Charcoal, dark and earthy, threaded through with something richer — fat meeting fire. I follow it down a narrow corridor, past shuttered shops and flickering signage, until I reach Kazu Sumiyaki Restaurant. Inside, the room is small and warm and already full. Someone laughs at the counter. A skewer hits the grill with a soft hiss.

I take a seat where I can watch the chef work. He has been at this grill, I’m told, for more than thirty years. It shows in the way he doesn’t rush. He turns each skewer by feel, not by clock, reading the char the way you’d read a familiar face.

The foie gras arrives first. Crisp on the outside where the charcoal has done its work, then giving way to something soft and molten underneath — a single bite that seems to hold two textures at once. Then the sweet potato, its edges caught with smoke, the inside creamy and quietly sweet.

It reminds me of the best food in Japan — simple ingredients, treated with such care that time itself becomes part of the flavour.

Sumiyaki is a patient craft. The charcoal isn’t there for spectacle. It’s there to coax flavour out slowly, to let the heat settle into each piece rather than sear it into submission.

That patience is the whole point, and it’s becoming rare.

Around me, the room is a mix I don’t often see. Japanese expats loosening their ties after work, speaking low over shochu. Locals who found this place years ago and never left. The tables are small, the air is thick, the chairs a little worn. Nobody minds. There’s a kind of honesty to a room that doesn’t pretend — no soft lighting, no curated playlist, just the sound of the grill and the smell of it in your clothes long after you’ve gone.

It sits three floors above a street that has spent years polishing itself. Orchard Road, just minutes away, keeps reinventing what dining should look like — brighter, cleaner, faster. And here is Kazu, doing the opposite. Refusing to change what already works.

That’s the tension I keep turning over. We’ve grown used to convenience dressed up as care. Menus optimised, spaces designed to move you through. But a chef standing over the same charcoal for three decades isn’t convenient. It’s the slow accumulation of small decisions, made by hand, thousands of times over. You can taste that somewhere beneath the smoke — not perfection, but attention.

What feels worth recognising here isn’t novelty. It’s continuity. A grill that has outlasted trends. A room that never tried to be anything other than what it is. In a city that rewards the new, there’s something steadying about a place content to simply keep doing the thing it does well.

I finish the last skewer. The counter has emptied a little; the chef wipes the grill and starts again for the next order, the same motion I watched an hour ago.

I carry the smell of charcoal home with me. It fades by morning. The memory of that quiet, unhurried craft does not.