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2019-06-20
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Summary: Holy smokes, I’ve never tasted beef like this before. With beyond-top quality beef and a system for perfect grilling, Yakiniku Great was the delicious yakiniku meal I've ever had I wasn’t impressed with some of their tacky sales practices, but the food was so good, it’s almost forgivable. Not cheap, but if you wanna splurge on beef, this is a great place to do it. Just make sure you listen carefully to what they say!You’ve got to have some confidence to name yourself Great, but Yakini
You’ve got to have some confidence to name yourself Great, but Yakiniku Great lives up to its name; Yakiniku Ridiculous is probably more appropriate. Located on Queens Road Central next to the Manhattan Avenue condo, it stands out in what is a relatively casual area for dining. Inside, it's a lot of wood accents and bright lights, with open tables with some half-booths. The setting allows staff to zip in and out to drop off food, as well as leaving space for them to help with the cooking. It's not built for intimate dining like 298 Nikuya, but I think it works well to maximise the beef experience.
Menu is as follows:
As you can see, it’s not cheap. We had the Kiwami course (HKD 820 for 7 slices), and we added the Chef Kimura Yaki, which is one of their signature dishes. FYI the Matsu course comes with the Chef Kimura Yaki, while the Kiwami comes with the insane Uni Chateaubriand.This is where their shady sales practices start – First, there’s a 30$ p.p. mandatory charge, which is a piece of seared beef sushi.
The sushi is fine for 30$, but at a restaurant where you are likely paying over HKD 800 pp, why nickel and dime people like this? Perhaps this is a carryover from Japan, but the ordering and meals in Japan are in my experience more modest, so I get the need for some minimum charge. HK is a splurge-heavy kind of city, and I’m sure not a single person orders a couple slices of beef and calls it a night. Second, the hostess made it seem as if there wasn’t enough food in the omakase itself, and that it was basically necessary to add the Kimura Yaki. We arranged a half portion for everyone because we were curious what it was, but being pressured to add more food (at HKD 400 for two slices BTW) is not the kind of experience I’d expect at a top-notch Japanese restaurant. Frankly, it’d be a bit vulgar to push your most expensive dish even at a dai pai dong.
Third, after we ordered all the beef (over HKD 1k pp BTW), the hostess said, “while you’re waiting we’ll bring out some salad and kimchi.” This wasn’t phrased as a question, but we responded affirmatively, as humans do, (“sure, thanks!”), assuming, as humans do, that these were part of the omakase set, which of course they were not. She gave no indication of this and when we asked them about it later, they were boldfaced about it being charged to our bill.
Now, in this kind of meal, an extra $160 to the total isn’t going to kill anyone, but that makes it all the chintzier doesn’t it? Why stoop to these kinds of tactics in a place like this, where everything else (including the non-hostess staff), was so great? Though I do think it’s more that specific hostess than anything, it does say something about the shop’s business model that they encourage this.
Anyway, back to the food.
In the Kiwami set you get all of these (one piece per person except the 2 of the cubes). I think the omakase sets are sufficient for a dinner, with perhaps a side vegetable dish or two. Though the beef is sliced paper-thin, it's all so rich that each piece is more-than-proportionally filling.It’s hard to describe how good these taste – they’re all ridiculously juicy, fatty and savory. We were left making overwrought X-rated noises and giving each other wide-eyed stares after some of the best pieces. Some are a bit chewier, and some are bit oilier, but they’re all delicious. Grilling unlocks all the flavor of the fat, and the staff is conscientious in telling/showing you how best to cook each piece (each piece has its own recommended timing). The grills themselves are built for these extremely thin slices, with constant heat and small, easily replaceable hotplates. You use pieces of lard to grease the grills, so nothing gets stuck or falls apart.
There are a couple of dishes to specially mention:
Shakushi
They serve it with a small cup of soup (tastes like dobinmushi; the teapot seafood broth soup), which you dip the beef into. The soup is a bit tart, from lime I think, and it balances out the fattiness of the beef beautifully.Kimura Yaki
The one we “had to try” is the only piece I thought was too fatty – they serve it a bit sukiyaki style, grilled with sugar and dipped in egg. The sugar does its best to offset the fat, but it’s still too greasyUni Chateaubriand
Basically a delicious mini steak served with butter-garlic-soy sauce, on a small mound of rice, topped with a generous portion of Uni. I don’t get fancy restaurants’ obsession with uni – I love it obviously, but it’s rarely complementary. Uni’s subtle ocean-y creaminess is too often buried by strong ingredients – e.g. Ronin’s uni with crab miso. That said, this combination more or less worked; the uni was fine with the butter/soy steak– and delicious with the leftover rice 😊Service overall is great, and the staff was on top of any questions we had. I've mentioned how they instruct you on cooking times, and they also demonstrate a couple of pieces to make sure you get it. Drinks list is sizable, and the Whiskey highballs were excellent. I was not aware that sake was so good with yakiniku (we had the Dassai), but the richness of both the beef and sake were a great match.
Overall, this place is amazing. I’ve had yakiniku before of course, but this is a different level. We spent about HKD 1300 pp, which includes the food I’d mentioned, a bottle of Dassai, and two rounds of highballs/beers. I think without the alcohol, you can get a great meal here for about HKD 800pp (the Matsu course is $620 for 7 pieces as well). Still not cheap of course, but apart from the crass nickel-and-diming, this place is absolutely worth an occasional splurge. If you like beef a lot, it might certainly be more than occasional.
张贴
