05/26/2020 by abc

Tucked away during a corner of the second floor of Middle Road’s Fortune Centre is Kappou Japanese Sushi Tapas Bar. Despite its unassuming surroundings — neighboured by various vegetarian eateries and sharing a skinny partition with a Korean restaurant — browsing a glass door brings you into a small world of high-quality authentic Japanese cuisine.

The restaurant’s interior is sparse. 12 seats face the kitchen, separated only by a counter, giving diners front row seats to the preparation of their food.

Spectating would be an appropriate analogy for anyone who eats at the restaurant. On the opposite side of the counter, 26-year-old owner and chef Aeron Choo dazzles her customers with both her cooking and her showmanship.

“Kappou”, the primary word within the restaurant’s name, literally translates from Japanese to mean “to cut and to cook”. it’s a method of omakase dining, where the chef decides the varied courses and cooks the food ahead of his or her diners.

According to the Michelin Guide, this sort of dining emphasises the close proximity between customer and chef. That’s exactly what you’ll get at Kappou Japanese Sushi Tapas Bar, where dining is extremely much an interactive and sometimes fun experience.

One course that Choo serves us involves a fist bump, the plating of caviar on the rear of our hands, a spritz of “caviar perfume”, then an encouragement to lap it up dog-style.

However, the fun Choo seems to possess serving up Japanese cuisine wouldn’t be possible without the effort and diligence she put in over the last decade.

But all that toil has earned her the unofficial accolade of Singapore’s first female chef-owner to open a Kappou-style restaurant in 2016, which continues to enjoy brisk business four years on.

“I really feel very lucky that we are still full a day ,” she tells us. “I believe it is the consistency of effort and diligence that has been put in every single day.”

Without a doubt — as a female chef during a male-dominated scene, Choo has had to place in twice the maximum amount effort and diligence just to succeed.

It’s traditional thinking — that females should stay the diners’ side of sushi counters — which relies heavily on dated stereotypes as justification and tiny else, really, Choo explains.

Take for example, she says, the difficulty of girls on their periods.

“In the old fashioned way, the consistency (of the food is down to) the chef. Therefore the unfairness of like ‘oh woman, when you’re having your period you can’t taste well.’”

Besides her, there are other females who do well as sushi chefs, she counters.

“I mean, as a person you furthermore may can have a nasty day right? So does that mean that if you’ve got a nasty day, you’re gonna have bad taste buds? That’s not professional.”

Choo is additionally entirely unconvinced by another gender stereotype: hand warmth.

“They say that [women] have warmer hands. Well, I do hold some guys’ hands and they are quite warm also,” she chuckles incredulously, dismissing it as “not legit”.

The obvious remedy for this, she points out, are some things already done by chefs, whether or not they are male or female: dipping hands in drinking water before making sushi.

“I always confirm that there’s ice within the bowl,” she says dryly.