Shusaku Toba opens o/sio in Singapore, his first outside Japan
Japanese chef Shusaku Toba has opened o/sio in Singapore, his first restaurant outside Japan, built around the casual pasta menu of his Tokyo original.
Chef Shusaku Toba has opened o/sio in Singapore, his first restaurant outside Japan, bringing the pasta-and-pizza menu of his Tokyo original to a 60-seat room in Tanjong Pagar.
Toba runs sio, a restaurant in Tokyo's Yoyogi-Uehara that has featured in the Michelin Guide Tokyo, and o/sio, a more casual spin-off he later opened in Marunouchi, not far from the stalls in our guide to what to eat in Tokyo. o/sio in Singapore, which opened on 4 November at 38 Tanjong Pagar Road, is built around that second, looser format.
The room seats about 60 around an open kitchen and a wood-fired pizza oven. The menu runs from a S$16.80 demi-glace ragù to a S$27.80 smoked truffle carbonara made without cream, plus pizzas from S$12.80 and a 150-day grain-fed Angus steak at S$28.80.
Toba now runs three dining rooms across two countries, with no third city yet named.
A second Singapore outpost
Toba already runs one Singapore restaurant: sio pasta, a smaller counter at Raffles City that opened in March. o/sio in Singapore is a separate, larger venture, with its own pizza programme and a dining room built for groups rather than solo lunches.
A handful of dishes carry over from the Marunouchi original, among them a fig butter bruschetta with prosciutto. Others were built for this market alone, including a snow crab genovese and a charcuterie board unique to the Tanjong Pagar menu.
Toba came to cooking late. Born in Saitama, he trained as a footballer in Japan's youth system and worked as an elementary school teacher before entering a kitchen at 32, training at Diritto and Florilège ahead of opening sio in 2018.
Why Singapore, not elsewhere first
Japanese chefs have used Singapore as a testing ground for years, partly because rents and staffing are easier to manage there than in London or New York, and partly because the city already has a dense audience for Tokyo-trained kitchens. Esora's Takeshi Araki took the same route when he opened Ao in Singapore, a smaller room than his Tokyo original, earlier this year.
o/sio joins that list without settling where Toba's cooking goes next: a third city, a second Singapore site, or a pause while the Tanjong Pagar kitchen finds its rhythm under a team an ocean away from the one he trained in Tokyo. For now, Toba is commuting between two countries to run three dining rooms at once.
