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6 hours ago
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Yari Club in Covent Garden, London, is a robot yakitori restaurant. I’ll break that down for you. “Robot”, as in the food is prepared by our new mechanical overlords. “Yakitori” is, essentially, meat grilled on small skewers – think tiny Japanese kebabs dipped in sauces. And then, of course, “restaurant”, as in that place where humans once had jobs before the robots took over. Bleeding robots, eh, clanking in here, taking our jobs?
In fact, Yari Club’s “robot” sits in the window of the shop, seemingly to taunt passing Michelin-starred chefs who believe the world will cease to spin if these culinary gods are not up by 5am to source fennel pollen and beech sap. Real chefs can be a huge pain: pricey, sulky and fickle. But there are no such problems with the chef at Yari Club, because it’s a big stainless-steel box filled with hot oil. Despite that jaw-dropping, futuristic aspect being trumpeted loudly in all the marketing, this particular robot is, at first glance, hugely disappointing. Less robotic than I’d imagined (or hoped for) and more simply a deeply unattractive kitchen gadget. Skewers of chicken hearts, chicken gizzard, chicken wings and every other imaginable bits of a chicken are loaded on to a pulley, dragged through hot oil for a robotically precise number of minutes to make them succulent, then dipped into a special, sweet, soy-based sauce to finish.
What was I expecting? One of the 1980s mime duo Tik + Tok wearing an apron and beckoning me inside to eat microchips in a repurposed spacecraft? No, but neither did I expect the robot to be simply a no-frills deep-fat fryer, or – and this is the kicker – for it to rely so heavily on humans to do its job. On the lunchtime I visited, Yari Club was almost empty, while Berwick Street market just up the road in Soho was absolutely heaving with lunch-hour workers queueing at its plethora of food trucks, or at the newish pizza spot Breadstall, where artisan slices of cheesy carbs are cooked and served by human hand. Oddly, there seems to be something about the big, spitty, oil-stained Yari Club robot that isn’t drawing the crowds.
At first glance, Yari Club’s menu might seem a little limited, especially if you’re not in the mood for autopsied chicken on a stick, or to eat it in an unlovable, brown “cafe” space that’s about as cosy as the waiting room in a regional minicab office. In actual fact, however, there’s a lot to love about the food at Yari Club, although it will take a good 10 minutes to work that out, even with the help of a wonderful front-of-house person who pointed out the bento boxes, the katsu curries and the very moreish corn ball options, which turned out to be deep-fried clusters of spicy, crunchy sweetcorn, and completely irresistible. It took another server to point out the tsukune chicken meatball skewers, the mulled sake, the winter specials menu, the padrón peppers and the vegetable tempura.
In fact, all the Yari Club’s robot experience does is underline quite how brilliant humans are, what with their opposable thumbs, patience and empathy, and how much hospitality needs them to survive. The Yari Club robot owes a great debt to real-life hospitality staff, because it can’t, for a start, process orders, load up its own skewers or put them on plates. It also can’t cater for vegans, it seems: one potential diner walked in, asked if the tofu scallion option could be cooked without touching chicken fat, was met with bemused looks and flounced out. In a normal restaurant, someone would have bargained with that customer, but robot yakitori not care about the flounce.
All that said, the food at Yari Club is really rather good and, at about £3.80 for two skewers, very reasonably priced, too. The momo chicken thigh skewer, the classic negima chicken, the teba chicken wings and the prawn tempura are all undeniably delicious: crisp, juicy, tender, smoky when they need to be, and soft and sweet in other places. For all of £13.80, you can build a whopping bento box featuring six skewers, rice or salad, coleslaw, pickles, nori and more of the special-blend, umami flavour bomb that is Yari’s dipping sauce. The mulled sake, meanwhile, has all the whack of sake combined with the synthetic aspect of supermarket mulled wine mix; a migraine in a paper cup. They have Coedo Shikkoko black lager and oolong tea in cans, too, as well lots of nice Japanese teas.
I’d go back to Yari Club for a snack, but it’s not really worth travelling out of your way for. There are more impressive robots at the Asda self-checkout. I have met our new hospitality robotic overlords and, as things stand, they still need our help.
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Yari Club 57 St Martin’s Lane, London WC2, [email protected] (no phone). Open all week, Mon-Sat 11.30am-8.30pm, Sun noon-8.30pm. From about £15 a head, plus drinks and service
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The next episode of Grace’s Comfort Eating podcast is out on Tuesday 4 March – listen to it here
