Please see the pictures of the following article on my website:
http://guides.suksanvillas.com/phuket-town/yakiniku-restaurant
One of the most popular restaurant concepts in Phuket is the “cook-it-yourself” venue. There are slight variations on the basic setup, but all of them have a hot grill sitting in the middle of the table and either you go and pick out your own raw scraps of meat or the raw scrapes are brought to the table.
As a rule, I hate these restaurants. If I could cook worth a damn, I wouldn’t be going to a restaurant in the first place. Then there’s the price that they charge you for this raw food. When a restaurant cooks and brings out a finished dish of food, you can somehow pretend that they put some sort of secret restaurant sauce into the food to make the normally 100 Baht chicken worth 500 Baht. However, when the same chicken that you saw out there in the market a minute before is brought out to you in the same condition you last saw it in, the difference in price is tough to swallow! I mean, all they’ve added is a bit of sauce, a hot plate, and some wooden chopsticks. How can that possibly double or triple the price?
Even worse is when you go to some of the local all you can eat and cook for yourself places and they really do charge you what the meat costs out in the street. They don’t tart it up much either. It’s just sitting there in a big vat of meat and you pull it out and cook it—cook it very, very well—and then try to get as much of it down as you can because they actually charge you extra for every gram of uneaten food on the table when you ask for the bill!
Against this background of meat vats and price gouging, I was hesitant to try out Yakiniku. The experience was actually very pleasant though for several reasons: the food, though raw, was presented well, the décor was nice, and there were several cooked sides available if you didn’t want to do everything yourself.
The food itself was brought out in nice cuts on separate trays with little bits of vegetable, garnishing, and sauce sprinkled around them. I mean, it looked like the dish had been prepared even though it still needed to be cooked. The meat was also sliced regularly and to a fairly uniform thickness so you didn’t need to run your own mini-butchery at the table. I’m no great connoisseur of raw meats, but everything seemed to be of a good quality. In any event it looked and even tasted good, and given my cooking skills, that’s something.
The surroundings were done nicely. It’s important that the tables are pretty big, first because you’ve got a hot stove sitting in the middle and secondly because you need to get back from the heat before your face gets a light grilling. The smoke usually bothers me in these places, but at Yakiniku, the stoves have a nice ventilation system that sucks most of the smoke back down into the stove, which keeps your table and the air-conditioned restaurant smoke free.
The menu was also broad enough that you just didn’t have several varieties of meat for dinner. I like meat as much as the next man, but one tray of grilled meat after the other wears on even me. So it’s nice when you can turn to a nice side of kimchi, sushi, or a salad to break things up a bit.
Yakiniku is an interesting take on a genre of dinning that I had completely written off. While a bit pricier than your normal place, the experience is well worth it, and I think that if you’re going to pay anything above the market rate for raw meat, then you want something a little extra in the way of presentation and surroundings. Yakiniku has that.
