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.
