Sushi plus

One of the first nights I was in Singapore, I joined my cousin and some of her friends for sushi. Mmmm, sushi. I (heart) good sushi. They also ordered some dishes I hadn't had before, at least not in a Japanese milieu. The first was a cracker-like appetizer (right). It's actually made up of dried baby fish (if you look closely you might be able to make out the dark spots that are the eyes) packed together and flattened, so that the dish looks a bit like a tatami mat. It was nice and crunchy, a little salty, but ultimately not all that special. I think it's just something fun and unique that this restaurant does, but I don't know for sure.
Sushi

Tuna with spring onion. Probably looks like lots of other sushi you've seen before. Fresh. Cool. Tasty. Mmmm, sushi. I'm sorry, did I already say that?
Maki

These were also new to me. Not in the basic food sense; they're basically skewers/kebabs/satay, cooked on a grill, but I've never had kebabs at a Japanese restaurant. You can order them by the stick, so we got a nice assortment. Sadly, they were out of bacon (!! -- but bacon makes everything better!), so we were forced to substitute for the bacon-wrapped mushroom, bacon-wrapped asparagus, and (I believe) bacon-wrapped chicken. But what we got was pretty darn good -- beef/asparagus, beef/mushroom, and beef tongue. The meat was tender and juicy, split nicely away from the stick, and was just salty enough to leave you wanting more. I confess to having been skeptical about the beef tongue, as I usually don't like tongue's texture all that much, and the taste never strikes me as particularly remarkable. But I was impressed -- the maki piece didn't resemble any beef tongue I'd had before, in texture or appearance; in fact, if I hadn't known, I would have been hard-pressed to identify what part of the cow it came from, but probably would have guessed something closer to sirloin tip. (That said, I do not consider myself a beef connoisseur, so laugh all you want; I'm just sayin' it surpassed expectations.)
The service was a little slow, which also might have had something to do with it, but I'd like to think that it was just because they were so yummy that we devoured them too quickly for me to get a good picture. I believe that one there is a beef-wrapped mushroom.
Sushi

With five of us digging into the raw fish, we went ahead and ordered a large assortment. Tuna, tuna belly, squid, salmon, yellowfish, eel, roe, and... um, one other that I can't remember or identify. Mmm, sushi.