Chris Lucas doesn’t know how many restaurants he’s opened. “If you start counting things, it’s not really cool,” he tells Broadsheet over the phone. But his Japanese restaurants includes the slick upmarket Kisume and the Blade Runner 2049-inspired Yakimono; his latest, Tombo Den, he says is the third piece of the story.

The new restaurant sits next to Lucas’s Malaysian- and Singaporean-inspired Hawker Hall on Chapel Street, Windsor. He says the venue will feel more casual than Kisume and Yakimono, and is intended to be lowkey. But that’s not to say it won’t have his signature splashy style.

Tombo Den is inspired by late-night Tokyo. “I’ve tried to create a really cool sexy aesthetic,” says Lucas. “There’re a lot of electronics in Japan, a lot of neon, a lot of pop art, so it’s quite a throw to that electric sort of night-time vibe.”

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Lucas spent three years living in Tokyo while working in finance in the ’90s and had a lot of Japanese street food. Tombo Den is an homage to those “small little tiny restaurants that do anything from sushi handrolls, sometimes they do small bowls of noodles, they might do little ramens, some places just do tonkatsu”, he says. “I sort of wanted to always see if I could create a restaurant around that [concept].”

The menu was designed by Lucas and head chef Dan Chan, who was part of the opening team at Supernormal and previously worked at Michelin-starred restaurant Yardbird in Hong Kong.

Everything is designed to share, and includes sushi, dumplings, a raw bar, rice and noodle dishes, and proteins cooked over coals. A sushi counter, helmed by Kisume chefs Toaki Kyo and Carlos Lopez, will serve rotating nigiri, handrolls and other seafood dishes, and will be a big part of the dining experience.

Upstairs is going to be “a little quiet, little sort of sexy bar”. The bar level will also have a small karaoke room that can be rented out for private events.

As for the name? It’s a nod to a sushi handroll spot called Tombo, where the chef was also named Tombo, that Lucas loved visiting when he lived in Tokyo. “It’s a bit of a throw to him, actually. He wouldn’t even know about it … but [Tombo] was a favourite of mine.”

Tombo Den is expected to open at 100 Chapel Street, Windsor, this September

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