Restuarant
My friends and I went to the Hana restaurant located at Forum The Shopping Center for dinner on Sept 23, 2017. It is a Japanese restaurant with an integrated bar. Alcoholic drinks like beers, wine, and Japanese Sake can be ordered.
If you are going to eat there, do take note of the opening hours as follows:
Lunch: 12pm to 2.30pm
Dinner: 6pm to 9.30pm
Ideally, you should make a reservation if you don’t want to share tables with other people. The restaurant itself is also rather small and can fill up rather fast.
In terms of service, it was decent enough. The staff were friendly. Presentation wise, it was clean but not quite minimalistic.
Food
We ordered a Sashimi Platter, regular-sized, for the price of $48.
I don’t think it is worth the price since there were only a few slices of Yellowtails, Tuna, scallops, farmed salmon and spot prawn. I could get bigger portion of the sashimis in the form of Kaisen Chirashi Don for the price of ~$27 at The Sushi Bar. Freshness wise, it was acceptable.
One of my friend and I ordered the Flying Cha Soba with Maki, which cost $18 each.
It was one of the more unique dishes on the menu. One of my friend called it a gimmick, which I agree. At the end of the day, it’s just soba presented in a different way. The food itself wasn’t that particularly good or bad. The main soba sauce, despite us adding the quail egg, seaweed, and spring onion in, it was mostly tasteless. My friend went to add the fake wasabi in for additional flavor but it didn’t work. The sauce is just too bland. The other sesame-based with half-boiled egg sauce was better and added a little more flavor to the otherwise bland noodles. I didn’t get to taste any hint of green tea from the noodles though.
For drinks, I didn’t order any alcoholic drinks and I personally prefer coffee over anything else. So I ordered a cup of ice Americano for $5.
The first sip gave me a good coffee kick. I quite like the taste of the coffee as it has the right balance of bitterness and sourness. Comparable to the Cold Brew I always order from Starbucks.
Conclusion
The final bill was $142 for three person, which I would say is on the slightly more expensive side. If you are nearby, want to eat Japanese food, and don’t mind paying a little more, you can go there. I haven’t try the other dishes, so I don’t think it would be fair of me to outright reject that place. For me, I don’t think I will go out of my way just to eat there. There are other better restaurants around Orchard Road.
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