While still in California for a string of travel and before heading back home to Las Vegas, I met up with one of my friends and her parents to try the chef’s tasting menu dinner at YakiYa in Pasadena of Los Angeles County, California.
When we arrived, we were given warm hand towels and yuzu refreshers to prepare us for our meal.
Our appetizer was raw ground A5 Miyazaki wagyu with ponzu jelly, truffle, and arimo sancho pepper.
The wagyu had a surprisingly mild flavor and was a bit gelatinous. I didn’t spend any extra time to carefully inspect it before eating it, but I’m guessing that it was intentionally made to be lighter. It was overall pretty refreshing.
Here is a random photograph of our golden utensils.
Next was USDA Prime ribeye tataki with ponzu, garlic, and Kaiware. This was served raw like carpaccio. I thought it would have probably been better with a light sear on the outside, but it wasn’t bad as served either.
My friend and I got two non-alcoholic beverages. Mine was the Soft Pagoda with yuzu, honey, lime, and a yuzu gummy; my friend’s was the Cherry Blossom with Amareno cherry, grenadine, and lemon. The Soft Pagoda tasted almost exactly like the yuzu refreshers we got at the beginning of the meal; the Cherry Blossom tasted like a citrusy sweet cherry juice.
Our next appetizer was bluefin tuna and hamachi with Kaluga caviar, scallion oil, and wasabi. The fish had very low fat content so it was fairly firm, but it was still very clean and fresh. The caviar was as expected, and the scallion oil added an interesting uniqueness to the sashimi.
From here, I started questioning the ordering of the dishes, because our next dish was chawanmushi with Dungeness crab, ikura, and shiitake mushroom. I feel like this could’ve been better served between some of the meat dishes or later on in the meal, but it still had good flavor and wasn’t bad early on in the menu. The texture was a bit strange, though—it started out with the slightly firmer and custardy texture you’d expect from chawanmushi, but it was way too watery once I got to the bottom.
Next was local farmer’s market crudité with multigrain rice cracker and red miso. This, again, felt like it would’ve been better elsewhere in the meal—namely, near the beginning. The rice cracker was good, the vegetables were clean and refreshing, and the red miso added a nice richness to the veggies.
At this point, we were confused if we would ever actually use the grill in front of us, because the waitress brought out wagyu meatballs and radish in oxtail broth. Again, it tasted great, but this would’ve been better in between meat dishes as somewhat of a palate cleanser to change up the texture sequence of the dishes, as opposed to just having back-to-back non-grill dishes right at the beginning.
It was finally time for the grill… and unfortunately, this is where things sort of started going downhill. First up was American wagyu beef tongue with scallion kosho. Tongue is my favorite cut of beef, so I was looking forward to this one.
Unfortunately, we found out that it wasn’t actually a real chef who was cooking our wagyu for us, but instead, just our waitress. A big part of good wagyu is making sure it is cooked properly, and just by looking at the way our waitress even picked up the tongs, it showed that she was neither experienced nor confident.
The tongue came out overcooked.
Our next batch of meat was USDA Prime ribeye, USDA Prime outside skirt, and A5 Miyazaki chuck with a side of wasabi sauce.
By the time the waitress thought she was done grilling this and moved it onto our plates, it was still very undercooked. I’m someone who likes meat rare, and it was still raw to my standards. After I took a bite into it, I put it straight back onto the grill.
Our palate cleanser between plates was heirloom tomato, shishito pepper, and truffle mushroom.
Our next batch of meat was American wagyu short rib and USDA Prime filet mignon chateaubriand.
The filet mignon was served with bone marrow, garlic miso, kimchi, and nori.
Our final meat dish was A5 Miyazaki wagyu strip loin with poached egg and a sprinkle of Maldon sea salt.
The waitress once again improperly cooked the meat—not only did she take it off the grill too quickly, but she immediately placed it in cold raw egg (which was not poached enough), and that killed all the heat momentum on the meat and left it as-is. This left the consistency of the meat too stringy and the egg too watery.
Our first dessert was lemon sorbet with basil oil.
This was my favorite dish of the meal. The basil oil added a very special and one-of-a-kind twist to the lemon sorbet. I had never tried this combination before, and this was a fun introduction to a new flavor profile.
Our second dessert and final dish of the dinner was matcha balls.
Here are some photos of the interior of the restaurant…
… and one of the front entrance.
| Chef’s Tasting Menu ×4 | $ 512.00 |
| Soft Pagoda | $ 13.00 |
| Cherry Blossom | $ 13.00 |
| S.Pellegrino sparkling water | $ 8.00 |
| S.Pellegrino still water | $ 8.00 |
| Gratuity | $ 90.00 |
| Sales tax | $ 56.79 |
| Total | $ 700.79 |
The table on the right shows how much we paid.
I mentioned this a handful of times throughout this blog post, but I cannot emphasize this enough—the ability to cook wagyu properly is just as important as the quality of the wagyu. You can have a wagyu steak worth hundreds of dollars, but it’s not going to reach anywhere near its peak potential if you don’t prepare it well.
Wagyu also needs a lot of salt to bring out the rich flavor. Yakiniku restaurants will always give you a side of salt—either a salt-and-pepper mixture or some flaky salt—to dip your wagyu in to enhance the taste. YakiYa did not give us a side of salt… or a side of any seasonings or sauces, for that matter.
Overall, I was a bit disappointed by YakiYa. I feel like they took the chef’s tasting menu concept and tried to mass-produce it to be able to serve a lot of people at once. Chef’s tasting menus and omakase experiences are usually done in an intimate setting bar-side next to the chef and are usually capped at about eight people per round so each diner can get an appropriate amount of attention from the chef. YakiYa had a chef build the menu, but then delegated the rest to regular staff members who are unable to properly execute on the chef’s instructions.
The portion size of everything also seemed underwhelming. For some of the shared dishes that came combined in the same bowl or plate, it made me wonder whether we ended up with less food, e.g., rather than each person getting 1 portion, it might have gotten scaled down to 0.8 each as more portions were being added. I ended the dinner pretty hungry and drank a Soylent meal replacement shake right after to get some more calories.
Considering this is in Los Angeles, US$128.00 per person isn’t too bad, but I still wouldn’t consider it to be a top pick. For example, the omakase at Masamitsu, a restaurant less than a ten-minute drive away from YakiYa and still out in the suburbs, was absolute top-tier for only $22 more per person—good enough to be one of my all-time favorite restaurants.
So, the final verdict? It was fine, but there are better alternatives for the price. If you do still end up going to YakiYa anyway, just keep in mind that, at least in the way that they structured it when I was there, this is not indicative of what you should actually expect at a real high-end chef’s tasting menu restaurant.