Ichidon Winkitchen – Affordable & Mouth-Watering Japanese Rice Bowls in Yishun

Located on the outskirts of Yishun is an unassuming coffee shop, Gold 186 Cafe, which plays host to a hidden gem — Ichidon Winkitchen. This hawker stall serves fragrant Japanese rice bowls at relatively affordable prices.

The 33-year-old stall owner, Alvin, first started his culinary journey cooking up baskets of dim sum. His love for Japanese cuisine has motivated him to set up a stall pushing out Japanese food. He has been operating this stall for 6 months, and has made it his mission to provide balanced and healthy meals, while appealing to the taste buds of the younger generations.

True to his word, Alvin serves each bowl with a good ratio of rice, meat and veggies. Each don comes with a runny onsen egg, cherry tomatoes, and a refreshing cucumber salad with a light sesame dressing.

The teriyaki sauce in the Teriyaki Chicken Don ($6.90) had a perfect equilibrium of sweet and salty noted, and the egg yolk coated every grain of rice in a creamy goodness. Succulent and tender chicken thigh slices were also flame-torched to give a smokey char. No wonder this is the #1 bestseller.

To cleanse our palates, we had a scoop of the cucumber salad, and moved on to the next dish – Mentaiyaki Big Prawn Don ($12.90). The prawns were big, juicy, and tasted fresh.

Before Alvin brought out the flame torch again, he drizzled a generous amount of mentaiko sauce onto the prawns. Our only gripe about this dish was that the mentaiko sauce was too salty for our liking.

Finally, we tried the Truffle Beef Steak Don, another bestseller. Atop a fluffy bed of Japanese short grain rice lay medium well-done sirloin strips basking in fragrant truffle oil. Alvin believes that as long as his ingredients are of high quality, simple seasonings are sufficient to make the dish flavourful. As such, the Australian beef cuts are only marinated with salt and black pepper.

On top of rice bowls, Alvin’s menu also flaunts a remarkable selection of sides, including, most notably, chicken nuggets, mentaiko fries and mentaiko gyoza. When asked about his future plans for his business, Alvin admitted that he had given thought to opening another outlet. In the meantime, he wishes to perfect his recipes before starting on expansion plans.

MissTamChiak.com made an anonymous visit and paid its own meal at the stall featured here.