Design your own sushi and salad at Maki-San

Maki-San is a colourful place for customised sushi and salad bowls. You can pick every part of your sushi or salad to suit your taste. If it turns out great, you can take full credit; if it turns out awful, you only have yourself to blame. To avoid taking responsibility, you can simply choose from their selection of ready-made house specialities. Maki-San has outlets in The Cathay and Cathay Cineleisure as well as in 112 Katong.

We visited Maki-San at 112 Katong recently. The restaurant has a colourful striking visual identity. Bright colours and hand-drawn illustrations of sushi ingredients are used as part of the interior design of the restaurant as well as for their posters, menu, packaging and other materials.

The restaurant is small with only seats for 6 to 8 persons inside the restaurant. Currently, customers can only sit at tables placed outside the restaurant in the open atrium space.

Do it yourself-style eating is now quite common in Singapore, especially for salad. Usually you go up to the counter and choose from various categories of many different items to go into your creation. It can get quite stressful trying to understand how many items you are to pick from each category and deciding what to choose. The pressure mounts when the queue behind you gets longer.

At Maki-Sa, colourful boards on the wall clearly illustrate the sequence to follow to order a meal. They provide order chits so you can sit down and take your time to decide what you like, and change your mind as many times as you want. When you are ready, hand your order chit to the cashier and pay. Collect your food when the number on your receipt is called.

You can even make an order online before you arrive at the restaurant.

We ordered a Little San Salad ($7.90) and a Little San Sushi ($7.90). For the Little San Salad, we got to choose a base, 4 essentials, a sprinkle and a dressing. The salad was presented neatly in an average size bowl with the dressing on the side. The vegetables and fruits were fresh and crunchy. The salad looked quite good and tasted good too. We were pleased with our choices.

For the Little San Sushi, we got to choose a wrap, a type of rice, 3 essentials, a sprinkle and a sauce. The sushi came in a neat attractive box drawer with repeated patterns of hand-drawn maki. Slide out the inside box and the maki we designed would be revealed. We had chosen the crepe egg wrap (instead of the more traditional seaweed wrap) and other pale coloured ingredients. The maki we designed was not visually appealing. Luckily the taste was not bad.

Maki-San had done a good job in ensuring a good overall customer experience at their restaurant. On the whole, we enjoyed our simple meal so Sushi and Salad at Maki-San and we thought the prices were reasonable. We learnt a valuable lesson at Maki-San – much thought, creativity and effort have to be put in to produce food that would be a treat to the eyes as well as the palate. We definitely have failed in choosing ingredients that would make our maki look good. It is time to go watch the film Jiro Dreams of Sushi.