Last night Derrick brought me for dinner at Taka at Sushi Saito, the new restaurant in the newly opened St Regis Hotel in KL that is getting all the rage now.
It’s the first restaurant that the 3 Michelin star chef has opened outside of Tokyo. Now I’ve been to some expensive restaurants in KL but when I sat down and looked at the menu I instantly knew that this one was in a different league.
The menu basically had 3 sets, all of which cost over RM1,000 per head and that’s not even including any drinks. Throughout a set you typically have say over 10 pieces of Sushi and some fish or in my case some Wagyu beef. Forget Nobu or any of the other expensive restaurants in KL, this one almost certainly takes the cake.
The question of course is… is it worth it?
Dinner was around a sushi bar that my friend told me was imported directly from Japan. It apparently cost over a million bucks just to bring it in. The atmosphere is different. You kinda dine with a bunch of other people around a sushi bar so it felt somewhat communal but because it’s a small place, it feels somewhat private as well.
Then comes the food. I’m not so much into raw food so I’m not sure if I knew how to fully appreciate something like this but when it came to this experience I just closed my eyes and ate everything that was put on my plate. Heck I never even used to eat sea urchin.
Everything tasted really fresh and if there’s one other thing to really enjoy about the experience is watching how the sushi chef (if you can call them that) very skilfully cut and put together the sushi. Kinda really reminds me of the documentary Jiro Dreams of Sushi.
Another story I heard from my friend there was that the sushi chef here wanted to bring in their rice directly from Japan but faced some trouble at customs. So they had to resort to local rice but not all local rice could make the cut, only a specific type of grain. So what they all had to do was go through bags of local rice and pick out one by one of the grain that would qualify then use that.
I left the night feeling that what we’re essentially paying for isn’t just the quality ingredients they use, or the wonderful atmosphere of the restaurant or the great service from the staff there. It’s the years and years of training and experience that each of these sushi chef have had in Japan, demonstrated to you in dishes that come in the smallest of sizes.
I don’t see going to Taka by Sushi Saito just as a meal. I see it as an experience and when you look at it that way, yes it’s expensive… but maybe it’s worth it.
Timothy Tiah – Co-Founder of Colony, Kuala Lumpur Co-Working Space