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.
A Table for One, and a Grill That Belongs to You in Yakiniku Like
Dio Asahi | July 29, 2026
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…
-
Best Buffet Singapore: Where Hotel Buffets Turn Abundance Into Order
Dio Asahi | July 28, 2026
I used to think buffets were about greed. Pile the plate high, go back for thirds, leave feeling like you got your money’s worth. That was the whole game, or so I believed. After years of exploring this city’s hotel buffets, I learned the good ones focus on order. They transform a wall of food…
-
STR TAO Taiwan Cuisine and the Comfort of a Menu That’s Too Big to Be Lazy: Food Places Nearby
Eat Drink Asia Team | July 25, 2026
It was the kind of evening where you don’t want to think too hard about dinner. I’d been walking up East Coast Road, the air still thick from an afternoon shower, when I ducked into a coffeeshop just to sit down. The Bullion Hawker Bar. And tucked among the usual suspects — wanton mee, Hokkien…
-
Sesame Oil at the End: Finishing, Not Flavoring
Eda Wong | July 24, 2026
The wok is already off the heat. The greens sit glossy and dark, steam still curling off them. My mother lifts a small bottle, tilts it, and lets a thin line of sesame oil fall across the top. It hisses faintly against the warm leaves, and the smell rises all at once — toasted, nutty,…
-
Long Phung Vietnamese Cuisine, Where the Menu Doesn’t Waste Words: A Good Restaurant Close to Me
Eda Wong | July 23, 2026
I came in from the rain on a Tuesday, somewhere past 8pm, hungry and a little defeated by the day. The fan was clacking. A queue of three or four people stood near the doorway, dripping. Someone shouted an order toward the kitchen in Vietnamese, and a bowl of pho slid onto a nearby table…
-
The First Squeeze of Calamansi in a Noodle Stall Bowl
Dio Asahi | July 22, 2026
The bowl lands in front of me, broth still trembling from the walk across the stall. Steam rises and fogs the edge of my glasses. To the side sits a small dish of calamansi halves, cut and waiting, their skins slick under the fluorescent light. I pick one up. It gives slightly between my fingers,…
-
Isshin Machi East Coast: Where Comfort Food Turns Addictive
Dio Asahi | July 21, 2026
Let me clear up the first puzzle right away. The name “Isshin Machi” sounds unmistakably Japanese, and I’ll admit I walked in half-expecting ramen and gyoza. What I found instead was a Taiwanese kitchen, plates of lu rou fan, braised beef noodles, and golden fried chicken that trace straight back to the island’s home cooking….
Best Cafe Singapore: A Map of Brunch Plates, Quiet Corners, and Dangerous Pastries
Dio Asahi | July 18, 2026
I didn’t set out to make a list. I made a habit. Over the years, cafes became the places I went to think, to wait out the rain, to sit with a coffee I didn’t have to rush. Some I returned to for the food. Others, I returned to for the feeling — the way…
-
Pickled Mustard Greens: The Sour Note in Clear Broth
Eda Wong | July 17, 2026
Steam lifts from a bowl of clear pork broth, and a spoonful of chopped pickled greens slides in. The broth shifts at once, its richness suddenly cut by a sharp, clean sourness that sits high and bright on the tongue. The greens have softened in the heat but keep a faint, springy crunch. Someone leans…
-
The Potato Curry That Teaches You How Spices Wake Up: A Beginner’s Indian Cooking Lesson
Eda Wong | July 16, 2026
The first time I made aloo curry on my own, I burned the cumin. I remember standing in my tiny HDB kitchen, watching those little seeds go from golden to black in what felt like one breath, and thinking: this is harder than it looks. But here’s what that bitter, smoky disaster taught me, the…
