| rev:text
| - Came to Gyu-Kaku for dinner on a busy Friday night, and I'm glad we had reservations. The wait for a table was an hour, and even I waited a tiny bit for my table, despite having a reservation.
It's brand new and novel, so it's expected.
We sat down and took a look at the huge menu; Gyu-Kaku has individual plates of pre-cooked appetizers and grill-yourself meats and vegetables.They also offer set courses meant for groups, but we found that those set courses came with a lot of stuff that we really didn't want. In addition, they have "Happy Hour" offerings, that is only from 11:30am to 5pm, and it isn't posted anywhere on the website or in the restaurant, and we had to ask. Their cocktail menu is also on the weak side, so I didn't bother ordering anything other than a "mega mug" of Sapporo.
We ordered a takowasa with seaweed to start, which seemed to lack a real wasabi punch, but it was seasoned well and was a great way to start our meal. For the grill, we ordered the Harami miso skirt steak, kalbi short rib, beef tongue, duck breast, spicy pork, spinach garlic, and corn with butter. I apologize that all of my photos are of raw meat, but... what else are you going to do?
Overall, the meat for the grill was well seasoned and tasted fresh enough, and they cooked quickly enough to be eaten quickly. The sauces on the table were great for dipping the meats into, but the best one was the one described as spicy, but wasn't very spicy at all. I also liked that the servers would suggest cooking times for each plate, but it does make dinner a bit more of a chore, since I'm the one sitting there timing out my meats and making sure they're cooked properly and not overly done.
In addition, the vegetables came wrapped in foil, and were to just sit on the grill for a few minutes. I'm not sure if we were supposed to get instructions aside from time, or how other people really do this, but it was quite the sight of me having to pull the veggies out using my chopsticks, and then to pull open the pouches as quickly as I could, because the aluminum foil was doing its best impression of hot metal.
After all the meat and veggies, we had decided we were still on the hungry side, so we ordered a bowl of garlic noodles with beef. They came served in a hot stone bowl, and a server mixed it up for us before leaving it on the table for us to dole out. It was a decent way to fill up at the end of the meal, and something about the noodles becoming crispy thanks to the stone bowl was really tasty.
We ended the meal by ordering the fried taiyaki with ice cream, and we chose black sesame ice cream to go with our taiyaki. We had to do the grilling ourselves to warm the dessert up, which was kinda fun, but also charred the outside a tiny bit. Whether that's good or bad, I will leave up to you. The taiyaki tasted great, since I love red bean, and alongside the black sesame ice cream, was a great way of ending our meal.
As a random side note: if you aren't into loud, shouty places, you might want to avoid Gyu-Kaku. They do that thing where a staff member will call something out, and the rest of the staff shout their response in unison, which is great. However, the Gyu-Kaku staff seem to call out their responses whenever they feel like it, which ends up becoming a giant chain of yelling, disrupting whatever conversation I was just having.
My overall experience at Gyu-Kaku was great. Our server was attentive and very friendly, even going out of his way to make sure we made more convenient choices for two and/or ordered enough food. The food tasted good, where the meat was fresh and seasoned well, but I don't think I want to cook my own food very often when I eat out.
I'll probably come back with a bigger group to try more things and do less cooking, but I had a good time at Gyu-Kaku.
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