Restaurant Review: Plum and Toro - Japanese Bincho and Teppan Plates with Cocktails

The UTW (“Under Ten Words”): Japanese bincho grill and teppanyaki dishes with Japanese cocktails.

The must-orders (if any): Teppanyaki fried rice with cherry blossom shrimp and ao nori, tsukune

Summary: From the team behind Club Street’s Izy/Caché comes Plum and Toro, a casual Japanese cocktail/bincho charcoal grill and teppan concept situated across from Wolfgang’s Steakhouse Singapore on the 2nd floor of InterContinental Singapore Robertson Quay. The food menu includes small plates (sample item: the hilariously-named Uni Corn, which is essentially sweet corn tempura with hoba leaf and sea urchin sauce), seafood (sample item: Fugu Karaage), meat (sample item: Japanese Wagyu beef cooked in two ways with fresh black peppercorn) and various sandwiches served with seaweed fries. The grilled Canadian lobster tail with leek mayo and red tobiko possessed the youthful bounciness of three Primary Two boys on a trampoline, with the Farfetch’d flavour of leek leaching nicely into the mayonnaise, whilst elsewhere the gingery and sensually moist tsukune whipped its ponytail dancing along to China Wine. The best dish of the night was the teppanyaki fried rice with cherry blossom shrimp and ao nori, which packed quite the Chanel No. 5-esque olfactory punch. The happily salty and greasy marvel was texturally playful, with different forms of bite from the egg to the sakura ebi keeping your teeth pleasurably diverted. The food portions were fairly generous.

On the bar front, the cocktails involve Japanese ingredients as well as some form of Japanese spirit, with the Shinryoku (Nikka vodka, matcha, sherry, houjicha) providing some muddy moss eye candy for the green tea-obsessed, and the Roku gin-ed Negroni adding some sakura touches to the classic cocktail’s format. Patrons of Caché will notice that some of Caché’s signatures have been brought over and given the Japan-enhanced treatment, but somehow the cocktails here, suitably strong and premium ingredient-heavy as they may be, do not possess quite the same verve of spirit as those of Cache’s.

Whilst the overall experience was more than pleasant, there were no obvious anchors to build the meal around. Perhaps the rollout of the full menu will address that?