With the couples on either side of him as hot as the flames on his grill, our solo-dining yakiniku fan finds a mental escape.
Dining at a yakiniku restaurant in Japan quickly becomes a series of choices to make. Yakiniku menus consist primarily of a wide variety of different types and cuts of meat that you grill yourself, but per-plate portions tend to be small, so you’ll need to make multiple orders to get enough food to fill yourself up.
If you’re ordering a la carte, different kinds of meat have different prices, but many yakiniku restaurants offer all-you-can-eat options that give you unlimited access to certain types, and when our Japanese-language reporter Yuichiro Wasai opted for such a deal on a recent yakiniku outing, you’d think he would have then just ordered based on what kinds of meat he thinks taste the best. Things got a little more complicated, though, after Yuichiro sat down.
At most yakiniku restaurants, the majority of the seats are at tables with space for two, four, or more diners. At some, though, you’ll also find counter seating, and since that was an option on this day, Yuichiro had grabbed a counter seat. However, shortly after that a couple on a date sat down at the counter to one side of him, and then soon after that, another couple sat down on the other side.
In other words, Yuichiro was now sandwiched between two couples, and while they weren’t having full-on make out sessions, both pairs were in clearly lovey-dovey moods, scooched up against each other with their arms around each other as they ate.
Yuichiro found himself feeling increasingly self-conscious as he sat in what was a small buffer zone between the two amorous pairs, but because he was by himself, he couldn’t just focus on any dinnertime conversation of his own, and with his counter seat facing a wall, he couldn’t stare out a window either. However, it was at this moment that he realized that even though he was by himself, he could call on two allies to help him escape his feelings of awkwardness. Who were those saviors?
Beef short ribs and pork belly.
As mentioned above, at yakiniku restaurants you cook your meat yourself at a grill set into your table or section of the counter. Different cuts take different amounts of time to cook, but beef short ribs (kalbi) and pork belly tend to be two of the quicker ones to grill, which also means that they’ll burn more quickly than others. In other words, you’ve got to pay very close attention when cooking kalbi and pork belly, and the more Yuichiro was focused on his meat, the less he noticed the heat coming off of the couples on either side of him.
With kalbi and pork belly being fairly fatty cuts, they also produce a lot of drippings as they cook, which causes flames to flare up from the grill. Usually this is a startling, or at least annoying, part of the yakiniku cooking process, but Yuichiro welcomed the distraction. Sometimes the flames were so strong that he felt the need to put an ice cube on the grill to cool things down a bit, and again, he was happy to have a reason to concentrate on what was in front of him, rather than on his flanks.
Though they’re not the only dripping-intensive yakiniku menu items, in his experimentation Yuichiro found that kalbi and pork belly have the best combination of juicy drippings and quick cooking time, letting you keep your cooking tongs, chopsticks, and brain in near-constant activity. So even though the all-you-can-eat option he’d ordered allowed him to choose from a broader swatch of the menu, he kept up a heavy rotation of kalbi and pork belly for his entire meal, as they truly are the best choices for someone who feels self-conscious when surrounded by couples.
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