Kenjiro ‘Hatch’ Hashida: The Sushi Chef Who Refused to Stay in the Box

There are sushi chefs who spend their careers perfecting restraint.

Kenjiro “Hatch” Hashida seems more interested in seeing how much personality he can fit behind the counter without losing the discipline underneath it.

He comes from serious sushi lineage.

His father, Tokio Hashida, was a respected sushi master in Tokyo. Hatch grew up around Tsukiji, was handed a knife when he was three, and was trained from a young age to understand fish properly.

Yet for much of his youth, he did not particularly want to become a sushi chef.

He wanted to be an artist.

That probably explains quite a lot.

Because decades later, Hashida has built a career in which sushi, painting, fashion, pastry, restaurant design, humour and Japanese tradition all seem to occupy the same room.

The sushi is serious.

The chef does not always have to be.

Born Into Sushi, Interested in Almost Everything Else

Hashida was the only son of sushi master Tokio Hashida and grew up around Tokyo's Tsukiji market, where his grandmother also operated a gourmet provisions shop.

Fish was part of childhood.

His father trained him through practical exercises rather than lectures.

Hashida has recalled being challenged to remove every bone from grilled fish as quickly and cleanly as possible. On another occasion, he was made to spend days observing a Tsukiji fishmonger simply to understand how bonito should be prepared.

The expectation might seem obvious.

The son would become the sushi chef.

Hatch was less convinced.

As a child and teenager, art interested him far more.

During one school art lesson, instead of reproducing what he saw conventionally, he painted a green sun. One teacher thought the refusal to follow the expected form showed talent.

Later, he attempted to enter art college.

He failed the entrance examination.

Eventually, the kitchen won.

First, He Had to Learn the Family Trade

Hashida spent a year in culinary school before properly entering the family restaurant.

There, the education became considerably less romantic.

He cleaned.

He washed dishes.

He worked.

And he learned under his father.

His upbringing also connected him to a much older relationship with seafood: CNA describes him as descending from a line of fishermen as well as being the son of one of Tokyo's respected sushi chefs.

That gave him tradition almost by inheritance.

But inheritance would eventually become the thing he wanted to question.

Los Angeles, English and Johnny Depp

Hashida's career took an unusual detour when he travelled to the United States to study English.

The reason was practical.

His father's Tokyo restaurant had begun receiving increasing numbers of foreign customers, and Hashida wanted to communicate with them properly.

He spent about a year in Los Angeles.

There was also another objective.

Hashida loved Johnny Depp films.

While in Los Angeles, he would sit near Hollywood Boulevard hoping he might eventually see the actor at a premiere.

Remarkably, he did.

Through a connection, Hashida obtained access to the premiere of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory and finally encountered Depp. They did not have a conversation, but Hashida managed to gesture that Depp should adjust his collar for photographs.

Depp acknowledged him.

It is a completely unnecessary detail in the history of a sushi chef.

It is also exactly the sort of detail that helps explain Hatch.

Singapore Arrived in 2013

After returning to Japan, Hashida began reconsidering his future.

The 2011 earthquake had affected dining activity in Tokyo, and he also felt there was little point simply inheriting his father's existing customers.

After a brief period working in Shanghai, an opportunity emerged to bring the Hashida name overseas.

In 2013, Hashida opened in Singapore at Mandarin Gallery.

It was the first overseas expansion of the family restaurant.

Singapore would end up becoming considerably more than a temporary posting.

Hashida stayed.

By 2023, he was celebrating a full decade here.

Mandarin Gallery Was Only the Beginning

Hashida's Singapore career has been anything but geographically static.

The original Mandarin Gallery restaurant eventually closed.

There were subsequent projects and moves, including a Hashida restaurant on Mohamed Sultan Road.

That period also saw Hashida pushing further beyond conventional Edomae sushi.

In 2019, for example, he began working with a sturgeon breeder in Hamamatsu, Japan to produce Japanese caviar for his Singapore diners.

He was not satisfied simply to serve the caviar.

He became interested in the sturgeon itself.

Hashida experimented with serving the fish as sashimi, turning its bones into broth, pairing the meat with scallop and combining sturgeon with uni sauce.

It was typical Hatch.

Find an ingredient.

Then ask what else it can do.

Tradition Is Not a Museum

This tension between preservation and experimentation runs through almost everything Hashida does.

He continues to use parts of his father's culinary legacy.

At Hashida Singapore, guests could watch him carve sushi from a large slab of tuna in a style associated with his father.

The restaurant also continued serving his father's recipe for pickled ginger.

But Hashida never treated those traditions as untouchable objects.

His guiding philosophy has often been described through shu-ha-ri.

Broadly, the idea involves first learning and obeying tradition, then breaking away from it, and eventually transcending it.

That is a useful description of Hashida himself.

Learn the rule.

Understand why it exists.

Then decide whether it still needs to remain exactly where you found it.

Sushi With Dad Jokes

The atmosphere around Hashida has always reflected the same philosophy.

Traditional omakase can feel intimidating.

Hashida's version often does not.

CNA described him telling dad jokes in a booming voice, designing some of his own clothing and filling chopstick wrappers with little fortune-cookie-like messages.

In one revealing moment, a staff member corrected a diner for using a spoon with soup because it was not traditionally appropriate.

Hashida overheard.

He handed the diner another spoon and encouraged her to eat however she felt comfortable.

That may be one of the clearest demonstrations of his relationship with tradition.

He understands the rule.

He simply does not believe the rule has to make the guest miserable.

The Artist Never Actually Left

Failing to enter art college did not end Hashida's interest in art.

It simply moved into other forms.

He has painted.

He has designed clothing.

He has been closely involved in shaping his restaurant interiors.

And his food regularly behaves like something created by a person who still thinks visually.

When Hashida Singapore reopened at 77 Amoy Street in 2021, the restaurant became perhaps the clearest physical expression of that tendency.

The space was designed around the concept of a sandō, the traditional pathway leading toward a Japanese shrine.

Guests passed through a torii-like entrance before moving deeper into the restaurant toward the dining counter.

The restaurant was no longer simply somewhere Hatch served sushi.

It had become part of the story.

He Even Got Into Pastry

A conventional sushi chef might end the menu with seasonal fruit.

Hashida decided that was not enough.

He began teaching himself pastry.

At one point, while trying to understand macarons, he reportedly ate nearly 300 of them in a single week.

Eventually, his menus included creations such as hojicha and black pepper macarons and a lemon-and-eggplant tiramisu.

For his mother, he once created a Merlion-shaped monaka filled with kaya, miso, white bean paste and white chocolate.

To make the shape, he reportedly bought a Merlion figurine at Mustafa Centre and used it as the basis for the mould.

There may be more technically elegant ways to merge Japan and Singapore.

There are probably few more unmistakably Hatch ways.

Singapore Changed the Chef Too

Hashida has repeatedly spoken positively about living in Singapore.

One of the things he values is the country's mixture of cultures.

He has described Singapore as cosmopolitan and compared it to a kind of New York of Asia, where religions and food cultures coexist more naturally than in the comparatively uniform environment in which he grew up.

That environment appears to have encouraged collaboration.

Hashida has worked with chefs outside Japanese cuisine, including Chen Kentaro of Shisen Hanten, Hitoshi Yamanobe, Daniel and Tamara Chavez of Canchita, and Sun Kim of Meta.

These collaborations make sense for someone who seems constitutionally unable to stay inside a single culinary boundary.

Japanese technique remains the foundation.

Everything around it is negotiable.

He Also Worries About the Fish

For all the playfulness, Hashida has also expressed concern about the future of sushi itself.

In interviews he has discussed overfishing and the pressure placed on marine resources by global demand.

That creates an uncomfortable problem for any sushi chef.

The profession depends heavily on seafood.

The more successful sushi becomes internationally, the greater the demand placed on the ingredient at the centre of the craft.

Hashida has spoken about the need to think about what sushi chefs will be able to serve in the future rather than simply assuming today's supply will always remain available.

That concern adds another dimension to his restless approach.

Innovation is not always about novelty.

Sometimes the old way may eventually stop being possible.

The Amoy Street Chapter Has Ended

Hashida Singapore's Amoy Street restaurant later closed, ending another chapter in a Singapore journey that has already involved several different locations and concepts.

But Hashida has not left Singapore.

As of 2026, he is leading IYASAKA by Hashida at Raffles Sentosa Singapore.

The restaurant is part of OUE Restaurants and continues his combination of traditional Japanese cooking and contemporary interpretation. Its current menu remains omakase-led and focused on premium seasonal Japanese ingredients.

The name IYASAKA comes from a celebratory expression associated with wishing continued prosperity.

It is an appropriate title for the next version of Hatch.

IYASAKA Is Still Very Much Hatch

The current restaurant describes Hashida with three ideas that suit him unusually well:

traditional discipline,

electric curiosity,

and an artist's madness.

That could almost serve as his career summary.

He has spent decades learning sushi seriously enough to understand what should not be changed casually.

Then he has spent almost as long asking what might happen if he changes something anyway.

Caviar made in Japan.

Merlion monaka.

Japanese-Chinese dinners.

Taco collaborations.

Pastry after sushi.

Art inside the dining room.

A new omakase restaurant on Sentosa.

The pieces may seem unrelated until you realise the same person is behind all of them.

Then they make perfect sense.

Kenjiro Hashida Never Really Chose Between Sushi and Art

As a young man, Hatch thought he had to choose.

Art or sushi.

His father represented one path.

His own instincts seemed to point toward another.

In the end, he appears to have solved the problem by refusing the premise.

He became a sushi chef.

And he kept being an artist.

That is perhaps why Kenjiro Hashida has remained such an unusual presence in Singapore's Japanese dining scene since arriving in 2013.

The tradition is real.

The training is real.

The lineage is real.

But none of it requires him to become the silent, solemn sushi master people might expect.

He can preserve his father's ginger recipe and make a Merlion out of monaka.

He can carve tuna according to family tradition and then go home and make bead bracelets.

He can spend decades mastering sushi and still approach the next menu as though he has not quite decided what kind of artist he wants to be.

Perhaps he never needed to decide.