Nabe means pot, and it names the family of Japanese one-pot meals where the cooking happens at the table: a simmering broth, plates of raw ingredients, and everyone eating as things come ready. Our menu carries ten of them across two styles, sukiyaki and Japanese hot pot, and they are the best way to eat here in a group.
Where sukiyaki came from
Sukiyaki is one of Japan's younger classic dishes, and its youth is the point. For centuries the eating of four-legged meat was off the table in Japan, and it took the Meiji era, with its opened ports and foreign dinners, before beef found a Japanese format. Grilled on a plow, some accounts say, by farmers who had no other pan, sukiyaki became the dish that reconciled beef with the Japanese kitchen: thinly sliced, quickly simmered, sweetened with sugar and mirin, and eaten from a shared pot. It has been the celebration meal of winter tables ever since, which is a habit Singapore has adopted without needing the winter.
What makes sukiyaki sukiyaki
Sukiyaki cooks in a shallow, sweet soy broth, warishita, seasoned with sugar and mirin, and the classic move is to dip each hot piece into beaten egg before eating, which cools it and rounds the sweetness. There are two regional schools, and you can taste the argument in any Japanese menu: the Kanto style around Tokyo simmers everything together in the pre-seasoned broth, the Kansai style around Osaka starts with the meat, sugar and soy in the pan and builds the seasoning as it goes. Ours follows the simmered school. The broth reduces as the meal goes, picking up the meat and vegetable juices, and the last stage is a tradition of its own: rice or noodles dropped into what remains, so nothing in the pot is wasted.
Our pots
Sukiyaki comes four ways: shiitake mushroom, chicken, pork and beef. The Japanese hot pots run on a lighter dashi broth: pork, shiitake, chicken, beef, salmon, and seafood, the fullest pot on the page. The difference in practice: sukiyaki for the sweet simmer and the egg dip, the hot pots for a cleaner soup you keep drinking through the meal. If you have eaten shabu-shabu, that is the other member of this family, meat swished in unseasoned broth for seconds and dipped in sauce, and ours are the slower, deeper cousins of it.
At the table, in order
A pot meal has a sequence worth knowing. The broth comes to a simmer first, then the ingredients go in by their cooking times, the items that take longest first, the leafy and delicate things last, and the table eats from the pot while it is still cooking, which is why a nabe dinner never has a cold course. Sukiyaki runs the meat early, its fat seasons the broth for everything after it, and the egg dip comes into play piece by piece. The kitchen paces the plates to your pot, you are never holding three courses of raw ingredients and nowhere to put them, and the last move belongs to the broth: rice or noodles go in, the lid goes down for a minute, and the finishing course is the soup that cooked the whole meal. It is the only course you cannot rush, and the one people remember.
How to order one
A pot is a shared meal, so order one per two to three people alongside a few sides, the hand-made gyoza is the usual companion, and let the kitchen pace the ingredient plates. Tell us your chilli tolerance and allergies when you order and the pot adjusts around them, the pots themselves carry no chilli, the scale belongs to the ramen. Lunch runs 11:30 to 3:00 on weekdays and the pots are available through both services, 11:30 to 10:00 on Saturday, and we are closed Sunday.
Find us at 3 Pickering St, China Square Central, or call +65 6438 0328 to check pot availability for a larger table.