Yoroniku

Best meal we’ve had in Japan

Intro – A fine dining yakiniku restaurant where the staff cooks everything for you while telling you about the meat and how it’s recommended to eat each piece.

Ambiance – Elevated/ elevated casual

What we ordered – The beef sukiyaki meal set with wagyu caviar nigiri and chateubriand sando add on

•  Banchan- Radish, cucumber, and cabbage kimchi. All 3 were great. Great acidity and spiciness to cut through the fatty beef to come. Spinach was lightly salted, beans sprouts were lightly dressed in sesame oil, and pickled mushrooms were soft and meaty. Nothing special. Good option for variety and refreshing the palette if you have too low of spice tolerance for kimchi. Rating 8.8/10
• Cold beef dish
  • Marinated beef tongue – the most amazing piece of raw beef I’ve ever had. So tender and fatty it just melts in your mouth. Flavor of the marinade was slightly sweet and not overwhelmingly soy sauce forward. Rating 9.7/10

• • The other piece of raw beef – didn’t get the name but it was very well marbled. It looked like it would be very tender and fatty but surprisingly not as much as the tongue. Rating 7.7/10

• • Beef Tartare – great umami from the flakes of seaweed. A beautiful balance of richness from the egg yolk and sweetness, acidity and umami from the sauce. Best beef tartare I’ve ever had. Rating 9.2/10

• • Thinly sliced beef tongue – Lightly seared and dipped in their house dipping sauce. Tender and fatty again well balanced by their umami sweet and savory sauce. Rating 9.0/10

• • Medium sliced beef tongue – lightly seared and served half raw. A little chewy but beef flavor slightly dialed up. Still nice a fatty, dipped in sauce. Rating 9.1/10

• • Beef shank – first time I’ve seen shank served just seared. And this was a medium sear. So tender, so fatty, so flavorful. The beef flavor is getting cranked higher and higher and the wagyu fat is coating my entire mouth with this bite. Rating 9.5/10
  • Filet mignon – beef flavor took a little dip but tenderness was incredible. Softest piece of beef you’ll ever have. Not too lean for a filet mignon either. I just prefer flavor over texture but my wife loved this piece. Rating 9.4/10

• • Clear Japanese Soup – a little break from the beef. The soup was warm and tasted like a super refined dashi. Beautifully salted and a great intermission. There were some fun pieces of mushroom and I think tofu. Rating 7.8/10

• • Wagyu Caviar nigiri – the raw wagyu was fatty and tender. The caviar was bringing a well rounded salinity to the table. The shisho was providing herbal complexity. The sushi rice was sweet and the seaweed quality was unbelievable. Rating 8.7/10

• • Marinated beef tongue – the only piece I forgot to take a picture of. I believe it was beef tongue again but I would be mistaken. It was super thin, almost shave thin, lightly seared and asked to eat with sauce, and then to eat with a small prepped ball of rice. This was probably my favorite bite of the night. The beef flavor and flavor of the marinade melded together, putting the flavor out of the fricken stratosphere. May be of the best bites of food period. It was fatty, sweet, acidic, and smoky. Simply insane. Rating 9.9/10

• • Sirloin – first piece of hard seared beef in the meal. We cranked the beef flavor back up. A little chewy for the marbling of sirloin nothing you need a knife for. The fire grill added great char again perfectly balanced by the house sauce. Eating it with the garlic chips was a nice touch to add a crunchy contrast and the garlic flavor didn’t overwhelm the beef at all. Rating 9.1/10

• • Seared Zabuton – this dish was something else. The zabuton was hard seared and then added to the bowl of sauce, salad that included lettuce, scallions, carrots, and shisho, and a ball of finely grated radish. We were asked to mix well before eating. This was phenomenal. The beef flavor – peak. Fattiness – unreal. The sauce was an iteration of their house sauce with extra acidity to cut through the beef fat. The salad and radish just did a perfect job highlighting the fattiness and beefiness of the steak while having us coming back for more. Rating 9.8/10

                                 

• • Chateaubriand Sando – Starting off by toasting the bread on the grill, the server constantly moved it around to ensure an even toast and kept tapping on the surface to ensure it was the perfect level of toasted. Then she carefully sauced it with an in house katsu sauce. The chateaubriand was cooked in their kitchen. It was a little gray and not breaded at all. However it was perfectly cooked all the way through. It seemed weird that it wasn’t a hard sear but after the first bite I didn’t even care. The meat was crazy tender, it might have been softer than the bread. The sauce brought everything to the table and brought out the best of the beef. Sweet and tangy, and full of umami. They had a small amount of yuzu kosho that we could add to our sandwich with a spoon that allowed for a whole new bite that was so fragrant and slightly spice to cut through the sandwich. Rating 9.7/10

• • Beef sukiyaki- it was shabu thin beef quickly cooked in a beef based broth. The beef was then added on top of an egg yolk and extra broth was spooned on top. Then the served shaved a generous amount of black truffle over the top. Everything was well mixed to create a sauce with the egg yolk and broth. We were asked only to eat the meat and leave behind the sauce. Really amazing beefiness and smokiness. The fresh truffles just added an intoxicating veil of aroma to the beef and the egg yolk. Rating 9.2/10

 

• • Beef sukiyaki rice bowl – The server then added cooked rice to our sauce to create almost like beef truffle risotto. So rich and decadent from the egg yolk and truffle with a smoky beef broth underpinning the entire dish. Rating 8.8/10

• • Cold soba – Cold soba served with seaweed. The seaweed provided most of the flavor and umami. The noodles had great chew. Really refreshing savory dish. Not that great in isolation but great in the context of the meal. This was a cold savory dish to bridge us to our cold dessert. Rating 7.2/10

• • Hojicha shaved ice – they first brought out a hojicha flavored shaved ice with sweet black beans on the side. At first, I expected shaved ice to be a cop out free dessert that restaurants then to give out as a nice refreshing treat. This blew that expectation out of the water. The hojicha flavor was so salient and the shaved ice was so so fluffy it was deflating with every scoop. The sweet black beans added back an amazing well rounded sweetness to balance out the pleasant astringency of the hojicha. Rating 9.1/10

• • Condensed milk shaved ice – I expected this to be shaved ice with condensed milk on top. After the first bite, my mind was blown even further. The vividness of the condensed milk flavor was unreal. It tasted as if they froze condensed milk and turned it into shaved ice. It made my guilty pleasure of eating condensed milk by the spoon socially acceptable. There were some black beans and fruit in there that gave it variety and not too one note. Rating 9.5/10

Conclusion – One of the best meals of my life. I’ve never had beef served in so many different ways. Each iteration of beef served was the best version of that dish that I’ve had. The menu was so thoughtfully crafted, taking my tastebuds through a rollercoaster of beef flavor. The quality of everything, from the beef down to the seaweed sprinkled onto cold soba, was top notch. Unreal attention to detail from the chef and staff. I cannot recommend this place enough.

Overall rating – 9.6/10