Shima Restaurant @ Goodwood Park Hotel, Singapore (Nov 2020)

 To all Japanese food lovers out there, read this!

WARNING - This is an extremely poor review and may offend you who may like this place but I'm doing it because it is only fair to us consumers to know the truth of the unauthentic and horrendous food and experience that this fake Japanese restaurant is cheating our wallets of.

What you see on photogrid above is what you get for the $250 Omakase teppanyaki menu at Shima restaurant. Given this is one of the oldest Japanese restaurants in Singapore that pride themselves on authenticity, I figured let's give this menu a shot since there was a 1 for 1 promotion. I initially had doubts about coming here but my conscience told me to just try it out and sadly, it turned out to be the worst Japanese meal of my entire life.

Yes you read that correctly, it was the worst Japanese meal I have ever had. And quite frankly not just the worst but this restaurant is a cheat and a fake. What they served during the $250 Omakase course is not Japanese food but ordinary food made to look like it was Japanese and sold to you at that premium "Japanese" price. There was nothing Japanese about this meal and I felt cheated and robbed not just of the experience but my money as well.

Unlike most reviews where I would present the photos of my meal and then do a simple conclusion, I'm going to go into detail with what went wrong on every dish and then talk about the experience as a whole at the end of it.

I sat at the side of the counter and noticed only the lobsters were presented. The chef didn't arrive until after the tempura was served and he didn't even bother to show us the A5 wagyu beef that we were going to be served.

Firstly, my Iced green tea had no ice in it and it wasn't even cold to begin with. The sashimi looked and tasted cheap, almost as if it were bought off the shelves from the supermarket. All 3 had an aftertaste which is a sign that it is not of good quality.

Sakura Ebi Tempura. The tempura batter was so thick that it felt like biting into plain flour. There was no taste, no saltiness, nothing. Absolutely tasteless

Finally the chef arrived and obviously he wasn't Japanese. He didn't even bother to introduce himself or explain anything about the meal and just started frying the salmon. He didn't even show us the A5 wagyu beef...Anyway supposedly this is salmon fried with butter and spicy miso. You know its bad quality from the light colour of the salmon and it was extremely bland, almost like there was no seasoning at all.

The lobster was all right but that's only because it was fried with a whole load of mayonnaise to give it some taste if not it would've been just as bland as the salmon. The meat wasn't even taken out properly by the way so you still had to dig out some of it that were stuck to the shell.

And here's the star of the show, the A5 wagyu beef which was unfortunately bland. It didn't taste close to A4 and this supposed to be A5? I also noticed that the stove was extremely hot. Usually stoves in authentic teppanyaki restaurants in Japan are not that hot because it wouldn't cook the marbled fatty beef properly if it were too hot. But obviously the chef here didn't know that and just did a quick job of this beef. Absolutely terrible!

However, the real sin here is the garlic chips which weren't even freshly fried! They were taken out of a disgusting plastic bag from some supplier. The chips were stale and hard! After I told the chef about it, he didn't even care! He just took out some more from that disgusting plastic bag full of stale and hard garlic chips as if to think this bag had fresher ones. What a joke of a chef and the restaurant!

Does this look good to you? Again let me remind you, it's part of a $250 course menu

Soggy vegetables without any flavour whatsoever

Garlic fried rice but fried using Jasmine rice instead of Japanese rice! Gosh, this is a Japanese restaurant right? They don't even use Japanese rice? Needless to say, the fried rice wasn't very good and I couldn't even pick up the rice with my chopsticks. Do I really need to elaborate further on just how bad this was?

Miso soup served without a cover so yes it became cold really quickly! Rolling my eyes now

Probably the best tasting item of the whole meal - the melon! The tiramisu tasted like it was initially frozen and then defrosted. By this time, I've had enough and was clearly unsatisfied and feeling pretty damn sick of this entire experience.

 

So there you have it folks! To sum up, just like I mentioned before, this is ordinary food made to look like Japanese food, sold to you at Japanese pricing. For $250 this is not only cheating us of our money and experience but daylight robbery at its finest as well. I know it's harsh to say this but just from this meal alone, this restaurant should be closed down for good for cheating its customers and simply being an insult to Japanese food.

Anyway, I believe I have gone into detail of why my experience and meal here was absolutely horrendous and if you agree with me, thank you very much, you have saved yourselves from a terrible experience and a chunk of your hard earned money. If you don't, that's ok, I respect your choice and I hope you have better meals here than I did.

Website: https://marketing73133.wixsite.com/website
http://shimarestaurant.com.sg/
Address: Goodwood Park Hotel
My rating: 1/5