Yakiniku, Edinburgh: ‘There’s something intimate about Japanese barbecue’

Any barbecue worth its smoke should be smelt before it’s seen. And so it is with Yakiniku, Scotland’s only restaurant dedicated to Japanese barbecue, where diners cook small, high-grade cuts of meat, seafood and vegetables at custom grills set into tables. On Edinburgh’s Southside, the restaurant occupies a thin sliver of a long, diverse, historically studenty strip known as the capital’s unofficial Chinatown. I approach with my partner, Claire, and our carnivorous eight-year-old at 5.30pm, the hour once reserved for cocktails and now increasingly occupied by the business of dinner itself.

There it is – the unmistakeable scent of marbled meat sizzling against red hot grills, fat dripping through bars, mushrooms wrinkling and prawns lifting seared tails into balletic curls. We must be close. The smell gets stronger, building our anticipation the way a sound system starts resounding in your gut the closer you get to the club. Until here we are. Outside Yakiniku, noses aloft, salivating.

The place opened with such minimal fanfare last year that I didn’t even notice Japanese barbecue had arrived in Edinburgh. Which is odd, firstly because it’s a style of restaurant – immersive, celebratory, fast, fun, saliva-inducing – that so easily lends itself to relentless viral reels. Second, Yakiniku is all about grilling your own food (as opposed to teppanyaki, in which chefs do the grilling in front of you) and despite the fact that we’ve been cooking over fire for millennia it remains smoking hot to do so right now. Third, Japanese ingredients, techniques and grills are so ubiquitous in European cuisines you can barely cross the threshold of a hot neighbourhood restaurant now without catching wind of the housemade koji.

Yakiniku’s owner, it turns out, is a Singaporean hairstylist who wanted to open a Japanese barbecue restaurant because it’s the food he craved most and he couldn’t get it in Edinburgh. It reminds me of Toni Morrison’s maxim that “If there’s a book you want to read, but it hasn’t been written yet, then you must write it.” Of all the reasons to open a restaurant, this might be the best. Yakiniku is small, lively and brightly lit, with a clean industrial look that’s just on the right side of gimmicky. Think oil-drum stools with tops that come off so you can stuff your coat inside. Toilets are entered via shipping-container cargo doors and the tables are stainless-steel worktops in which the electric smoke-free grills are lodged. (Not entirely smoke-free: at one point, when we and the tables around us are frantically grilling ribeye, chicken thigh, king oyster mushrooms and sweet potato, the door and bifold windows to the street are opened.) Hanging above each grill is an extractor hood, comically blocking the face of your fellow diner, which means the most I see of Claire is her hand reaching grill-wards with a lump of wagyu rump in her steel tonThis is first a source of hilarity; when we start squabbling over who gets to flip the last slice of Iberico pork shoulder, a welcome buffer.

Our grill is turned on and within moments it begins to shimmer. I order a Kizakura sake from the specials board. It comes in a 100ml chilled jar and is dangerously smooth and pristine on the palate. We order miso soup, squeaky and virulent green wakame salad and bowls of soft sticky rice – all faultless. Kimchi is often on Japanese barbecue menus in a nod to its origins – it came from Korean immigrants who brought their grilling techniques to Japan in the decades after the Second World War. Yakiniku doesn’t make its own, which feels like a missed trick.

The menu is simple to navigate: meat and seafood priced by 100g portions or “combo sets”, which give you 20% off. Instructions are given on grilling times, but in the spirit of all renegade cooks we soon ignore them and do whatever the hell we want. It’s brilliant value considering the quality of the produce. There’s premium wagyu from Japan; A5 grade, the most marbled and most prized. Other non-wagyu beef cuts include Scotch ribeye, skirt and flatiron, and there are prawns from Scottish waters and iberico pork from indigenous black pigs in Spain whose acorn-rich diet gives the meat its famed nutty flavour.

We order the £38.50 premium set: wagyu rump, ribeye, iberico. Dishes of raw meat are set down within minutes, each cut simply seasoned and precision-sliced to reveal the intricate maps drawn by marbled fa t and lives well-lived. First, from the seasonal specials, four scallops, attached to the shells. We prise them off with our tongs and ferry them to the grill. What fun. My daughter casts shiitake mushrooms at her grill, while a server appears now and then to quietly aid her, snipping her meat into little pieces with scissors. The house sauces are fantastic: a bright soy mixed with lemon and apple; fiendishly slushy garlic; a spicy chilli oil.

The scallops are our only disappointment: queens rather than kings, chewy and forlorn when prised from the grill after the recommended two and a half minutes per side. We should have taken them off earlier. Happily, as in one’s own kitchen, the more we grill the better we get at it. The wagyu is intensely buttery, but we all agree the Scotch ribeye has a deeper flavour. The pork shoulder is outstanding, not too fatty, tasting precisely of its best, most tender self. The prawns, delivered whole in a soy marinade, are best of all. The process of laying each one on the grill, watching it change colour and shape, charting the exquisite smells and the sounds, judging when to pluck it from the bars, then prising off head and tail, dunking the sweet charred flesh into each sauce, and gobbling it when it’s almost too hot to handle is pure sensory joy.

We so rarely get to interact with the food we eat in restaurants before it’s cooked. There’s something so intimate, communal and present about Japanese barbecue. This is a restaurant that forces you to notice, up close and among strangers, what it means to cook with and for the people you love.