Nippon Street gives you a taste of traditional Japanese matsuri festivals with a variety of delicious food booths, adorable souvenirs and fun carnival games that everyone will enjoy! The bright lights and signature red festival lanterns bring the complete Sakura Matsuri experience all the way to Singapore.

…or so they’d like you to think.

Situated near the end of the Floral Display I previously reviewed, this unimaginatively-named section is their limited-time food, souvenirs and advertising marketplace, which takes up a rectangular area and a corridor up a flight of stairs. Yukata rental also takes place here. There are food festival regulars (Swag Social brought their donburi), and Japanese establishments, from Asanoya to restaurants trying to retail their sake at the end of the unpopulated corridor. They were very generous with their samples if you make it all the way over there past the Nissin Cup Noodles booth, by the way.

The seating area is a raised surface with faux-tatami bamboo rug with low tables. Everyone was being very good and either sitting with their feet off the side, or taking their shoes off. Hopefully this continues for the last day.

Make sure you get your wrist chop when you go in, they’ll fuss over it when you go back out to exit through the Dome.

The Sakura Cola was from the ‘Drinks’ stand, where it has an assortment of other sodas (cider in Japan indicates carbonation). They don’t have ice, but can provide you with a chilled bottle. The Sakura flavour is faint but pleasant – I personally still prefer Keisuke’s.
Max rates 2.5/5.

Next to it is the adorable packaging of Kimukatsu’s pork katsu sandwich.

Kimukatsu Pork Katsu Sandwich

The Kimukatsu selling point is layered pieces of thin pork, fried in a big swollen katsu. You get a quarter katsu in each sandwich. ($8 total, $4 each.) The old adage of judging a book by its cover is unfortunately true, because their flagship pork sandwich is very poor and should instead be thrown under the bus (drum sting).

The bread is hard and dry to keep the wide katsu sandwiched, the crust is firm and heavily fried, the sauce is very flavourful…and the massive pile of pork in the middle seems completely unseasoned and was essentially tasteless. If the pork is layered, why wouldn’t you season it? The other variations – cheese and so on – might be somewhat more successful, but are all more than $8 and may not be worth the money.
Max rates 2/5.

Yummy Takoyaki

Finding regular takoyaki in Singapore has been hard recently – the Halal Yummy Takoyaki (mysteriously not named Takoyummy) is a practical and fairly generous solution to this first-world problem. We got 5 balls for $4 and the balls are relatively large, about the size of (and looking like) cuttlefish balls. The outside is surprisingly crispy and the inside appropriately squishy. The two downsides are that the octopus isn’t great quality, and the takoyaki sauce is too tangy and overwhelms the rest of the takoyaki flavours. Nevertheless a takoyaki I’m grateful for in this climate, and I’d probably buy more again.
Max rates 2.5/5, 3.5 on value.

On the other hand, be prepared to wait. People have a tendency to buy literal boxes in plural to take home – they will fulfill your orders, it’ll just take 10 to 15 minutes or so after you’ve queued for a while.

Hokkaido Izayaka

We’ve craved lavender Hokkaido soft serve ice cream ever since Savour days from a different eatery (we get our biweekly soft serve fix at Aqua S now) and jumped on this $6 iteration by Hokkaido Izayaka immediately. This cone is smallish, icy and not as smooth as you’d expect of Hokkaido ice cream, but the floral lavender note still comes through strongly.
Max rates 2.5/5. I’d be lying if I said I wouldn’t buy it again, I just wish it were better.