Tomi Sushi entrance at Millenia Walk with illuminated Japanese signage, a traditional noren curtain, glass windows, a welcome board, and menu displays outside the doorway.

The Slow Table at Tomi Sushi

BySue Lin Updated on

It’s a little after twelve, and the mall outside is doing what malls do.

People stream past the windows of Millenia Walk, bags swinging, phones up, everyone late for something. I step inside Tomi Sushi and the noise drops away, the way it does when you close a door on a busy street. The room is steady. Not fashionable, not chasing anything. Just quiet wood and clean light and the low sound of a kitchen at work.

I sit, and I decide not to rush.

Japanese meal spread featuring assorted sashimi with wasabi and garnishes, a green salad, simmered vegetables, miso soup, rice, and side dishes arranged on a restaurant table.

That’s harder than it sounds here. We’re a city that eats fast. Lunch is a gap to close, a thing to finish before the hour turns. But this place doesn’t seem to know that, or maybe it just refuses to play along.

The assorted sashimi comes first. Cool slices laid out with care, that faint sheen raw fish carries, a small mound of wasabi and a few pink curls of ginger beside them. I lift a piece of salmon, touch it barely to the soy, and let it go without wasabi the first time. Then the second piece with a small smear, just enough to lift the fish without drowning it.

That’s the quiet lesson of a plate like this. The wasabi, the soy, the ginger between bites — none of it shouts over the fish. It changes the pace instead. A little sharpness, then a pause, then the clean cold of the next slice. You slow down without meaning to.

Then the cold soba arrives, and the rice, and a small bowl of miso soup steaming gently. The soba is chilled and firm, the buckwheat carrying that faint earthy note that reminds you it came from somewhere with real seasons. Niigata, I’m told. The fish flown in from that same coast a few times a week.

You can taste the place in the rice, too. Koshihikari, warm and loosely held, each grain distinct. It doesn’t try to be the centre of anything. It just sits beneath the fish, quietly doing its work, the way good rice always does.

Empty Tomi Sushi dining room at Millenia Walk with neatly arranged wooden tables, chairs, menus, warm yellow walls, wood-panelled accents, and a framed Japanese character artwork.

This is what stays with me. Not one remarkable slice, but the shape of the whole meal. The sashimi wasn’t a headline. It was one note in something larger — fish and soba and rice and soup, each leaning on the other, none in a hurry.

I think we forget that raw fish can be part of a meal, not the whole event. We’ve learned to want the spectacle, the tower of sashimi, the photo before the first bite. Tomi Sushi asks for something older and simpler. It asks you to let the meal widen slowly, to eat the way you might at a table in another country, where lunch is not a task.

If you like Japanese meals where sashimi sits quietly beside rice, soup, and set dishes, check out this review of Sen-ryo.

Outside, the crowd hasn’t thinned. It rarely does. But at my table the soba was cold, the rice was warm, and I had let myself take the long way through it all.

I finished slowly. Nobody hurried me. The afternoon waited, the way it does when you let it.

Sue Lin