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Zento is as good as some of the high-end quality Japanese restaurants here.
Zento Asian Global Cuisine & Sushi Bar
18B Dempsey Road
6474-0378
Singapore, June 13, 2009 - Sushi bars in Singapore tend to have pretty straightforward origins: the chef comes from Japan and sets up an eatery here, or a Singaporean chef learns his craft from a Japanese sushi chef and goes on to open his own place.
Zento, on the other hand, comes to Singapore via Philadelphia and is helmed by an Indonesian chef who spent a year working with Morimoto Masaharu, one of the famed Iron Chefs based in the US.
The career path of chef Gunawan Wibisono and his wife Dyana Sulistyawati (above) has surely been a colourful one.
Both met and married in the US, where he moved seven years ago, and she, 10. Starting out in a takeaway sushi place, Chef Gunawan gradually worked his way up to the position of head chef in a New Jersey restaurant.
But he wasn’t happy and after 10 persistent applications, he finally landed a job at Iron Chef Morimoto’s restaurant in Philadelphia. The third Iron Chef in the highly acclaimed Japanese reality cooking show in the late ’90s, Morimoto was a former Nobu protege who went on to open his own eatery in 2001, specialising in fusion Japanese cuisine.
“The first month he was there, he couldn’t take it – he wanted to quit,” says Ms Dyana.
“It was so tough.” From being a head chef, he was relegated to a minion’s role at Morimoto’s, ranked last of his 10 chefs.
But by the end of his year’s stint, he had ‘learned more than he did anywhere else’ and vaulted over the other nine chefs to become number one, earning the right to work side by side with Morimoto himself.
Even at Morimoto’s restaurant, Chef Gunawan knew that it would be hard to go any further as an Indonesian chef making sushi.
So the couple struck out on their own, starting a small takeaway sushi place in a shopping mall food court, until the general manager of the Ritz Carlton Philadelphia noticed their food and invited them to open a sushi bar in the hotel lobby.
They opened sushi bars in top hotels like the Grand Hyatt, and started a catering business where they supplied sushi to hotel buffets and at convention centre events, earning a reputation for quality and freshness.
While the catering business boomed, the takeaway service didn’t, so the couple gave that up and opened the 25-seater Zento in the Old City – a trendy area of Philadelphia – that had a proper kitchen. From there, Zento’s menu concept bloomed.
Inspired by his stint with Morimoto, Chef Gunawan’s food took on a pan-Asian influence with dishes like tuna pizza where a flat round toasted corn tortilla is topped with slices of tuna sashimi and drizzled with a spicy cream sauce.
With two young children aged six and two, Ms Dyana knew that she wanted to return to Asia eventually so they started to look at either going back to Jakarta or settling in Singapore.
“We felt that Singaporeans are more appreciative of Japanese food than Indonesians, so we decided to open our first branch of Zento here,” she explains. Meanwhile, they still retain their business in the US.
The restaurant at Dempsey is much bigger than the original, and offers a clean, funky vibe that’s not quite Japanese even though the staff offer the same customary greeting when you walk through the doors.
While Philadelphia doesn’t strike you as the cornerstone of fine Japanese cuisine, Chef Gunawan’s emphasis on freshness means the quality of the fish at Zento is as good as some of the high-end Japanese restaurants here (then again, Zento charges similarly high prices too).
Miso marinated Chilean sea bass.
Zento’s food is a refreshing change from the norm. It has quirky but tasty fare like “riceless maki” with chopped raw fish encased in cucumber slices ($30) – perfect for low-carb dieters.
Carpaccio ($25 for scallop) is served warm – scallop sashimi is topped with garlic, ginger and yuzu-soy sauce and “simmered” with grapeseed oil such that the top is cooked but the bottom is raw.
A $65 sushi set lunch sounds expensive but is fairly decent value for six pieces of sushi and sashimi, and eight pieces of spicy tuna maki. The fish is fresh and of good quality.
For dessert, check out the deep-fried ice cream or the house specialty of chocolate lava cake – properly done with oozing chocolate sauce and moist cake.
Call it Iron Chef, Philadelphia Japanese or Pan-Asian cooking, but Zento is a bright spark on the local scene that’s worth investigating.
