Sushi Mitsuya is an intimate ’omakase-style’ Japanese restaurant in Singapore offering a bespoke dining experience. Omakase is a Japanese phrase meaning “I’ll leave it to you”, and in that vein, customers here leave it to the chef to surprise them with the menu.

The concept of omakase is a celebration in the art of food preparation in the same way that the traditional Japanese tea ceremony celebrates the fine art of tea, and it for this reason that the Japanese tea ceremony is employed as the metaphor in space creation within the restaurant.

Just as how guests at a Japanese tea ceremony pass through a series of spaces and events to symbolically leave the external world behind and focus on the art of drinking, EHKA Studio has carefully choreographed a sequence of spaces that one has to go through to arrive at the main dining area.

The entrance foyer is demarcated by a series of loose granite slabs and a large Sakura tree, and is separated from the sake counter via a hanging timber fence; customers are served sake on a stone block while their meal is being prepared.

They then pass through a curtain and walk down a narrow passageway before entering the dining area, which has a sushi counter for 18 diners, and a private dining pavilion.

The design language is one based on traditional Japanese elements, but the forms are intentionally more contemporary. The private room is a floating shoji-screened pavilion while floating planes made of shoji screens, timber walls and timber-framed panels shape the main dining area; the main dining table is also constructed out of solid Hinoki (Japanese cypress) timber, which gives off a relaxing, natural fragrance.

The designers wanted to bring out the architectural bones of the shophouse in which this restaurant resides. As such, the dining areas are expressed as separate forms within the shophouse space: the floors and ceilings of the dining pavilions are set off from the party walls, and the separation is further emphasised through the artful use of lights.

EHKA Studio
ehkastudio.com