Harbour City. New restaurant. Collaborative concept. Modern Japanese cuisine with a European edge. The warning signs were aplenty, but I chose instead to follow the hype and paid a visit to HAKU, a dining bar “curated” by Kashiwaya’s Hideaki Matsuo but helmed by the Argentine chef Agustin Balbi, who worked in Japan in the early years of his career.
The three of us arrived at around 1 pm; despite being warned beforehand I still found HAKU’s discreet exterior to be a sharp contrast to the surrounding chain restaurants. The 34-seater is hardly spacious. Open kitchen and the bar take up about half of the area, leaving enough space for four small tables. Seeing Balbi was absent, we chose to switch from the bar to one of the tables. There were various set menus to choose from — all of us went with the $850 omakase.
Morcilla Chicken consommeA few nibbles to begin. The fried kibinago (silver-stripe round herring) was cold. Better was the nori cone with striped bonito, coriander, ginger and chili. It was rich and crunchy as the seaweed was hardened in a dehydrator. Looked like a small black truffle, the deep fried Morcilla topped with mayo was alright. Chicken consomme with chanterelle, without any seasoning as all of the mild flavours came straight from the ingredients, was soothing.
Besides the obvious denominator of autumn, there wasn’t much cohesiveness between the various items.
Tomato with jamonThe seemingly slapdash mix and match between Japanese and Western flavours continued in our appetizer of tomato with jamon ibérico de bellota. The produce, cherry tomato from Kyushu and plum tomato from Hokkaido, was superb, but adding mayonnaise, dried seaweed, baked sake kasu and jamon together was a classic case of the sum is less than its parts. The ham and mayonnaise were completely superfluous and distracting.
OctopusSpanish octopus with olive was rubbery. Not helping the cause was the herb and olive sauce that was filled with a sand-like substance. Each bite was a grind.
ScallopHokkaido scallop in butternut squash sauce. Both the scallop and the sauce were sweet, yet the latter was much more intense and easily overcame the main ingredient. Kind of like pairing a Sauternes with a mildly sweet dessert.
BeefThe main course of 4A Kagoshima wagyu beef certainly was certainly impressive to look at. Three slabs of meat, picked for their leanness to offset the excessive oiliness of most wagyu, were placed on a small charcoal grill, ostensibly to infuse some smokiness to them. This had to be a slam dunk, right?
BeefUnfortunately none of the smell actually made it to the meat, which was very tender but mostly tasteless. The whole point of choosing wagyu is for its marbling — if there is concern over oiliness why use lean wagyu over breds with stronger flavour like good old U.S. Angus? The only saving grace was the beef bone sauce, which there was too little of.
RiceBy far the best dish was the ikura with rice. HAKU obviously takes its ingredient sourcing seriously, and it really shows in a simple presentation like this one.
PearDessert was a large nashi pear from Saga Prefecture on ice. The fruit was spooned out and put back inside, along with pear granita, panna cotta and yogurt. A refreshing end to the meal as the icy pear balanced out the creaminess of the panna cotta.
The bill was $1,000 per person, including a few drinks.
Like many things in life, it is useful to follow a few infallible principles when dining out. A useful one is to avoid new restaurants. Or tourist-infested malls. Or curious “collaborations”. When a place falls into multiple categories like HAKU, I have only myself to blame to come away disappointed. By no means was the food bad, and some miscues, like the cold kibinago, might not have happened had we visited when Balbi is around. But when I only liked 1 out of 5 dishes (excluding the nibbles and rice), I am not sure if HAKU is my type of place.
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