Sushidan Singapore opens a second counter at Parkway Parade

Sushidan Singapore opened its second counter at Parkway Parade on 5 September, a 35-seat room roughly half the size of the Raffles City original.

The concept comes from Tokyo and carries the name of Hiroyuki Sato, the Michelin-starred chef behind Hakkoku in Ginza and formerly head chef at Sushi Tokami. It sells omakase-style sets from S$19.90++, with a la carte sushi from S$1.99++ and sashimi from S$2.99++, and it works in an Edomae register: fish aged and dressed rather than served straight off the block.

Seafood is bought from Toyosu market in Tokyo and from Norway. The rice is seasoned with Kyoto red vinegar and blended from Akita grain, which is the detail that tells you what kind of sushi bar this intends to be. Red vinegar rice is a Tokyo habit rather than a Singapore one, and it carries older, fattier fish better than a light rice does.

Cheap omakase is not a discount. It is a different arithmetic on the same counter.

Why the Sushidan Singapore price matters

An omakase-style set at S$19.90++ sits an order of magnitude below the counters that made Singapore an omakase city over the past decade, where S$200 and up is normal. The trade-off is legible on the plate: shorter sets, faster turns, a smaller cut list and a counter that has to seat several sittings a night to work at that price.

That is not a criticism, it is arithmetic. A 35-seat room selling twenty-dollar sets needs volume in the way a twelve-seat room selling two-hundred-dollar menus needs bookings. The Parkway Parade site is in a mall in Marine Parade, which supplies exactly that kind of traffic, and the east of the city has had to travel into town for this style until now.

Cheap sushi in an expensive year

The opening lands in a market where rents and labour keep rising and where operators are testing the bottom of the fine-dining price ladder rather than the top. Tokyo has been doing the same at scale, as the food halls around Tokyo Station show, while London goes the other way with rooms of 265 covers.

A promotional run on Hokkaido uni is scheduled for the new counter. The number worth watching is whether S$19.90 holds through a second winter.