I bin at Bincho Yakatori! It’s a new Japanese restaurant in the Oxo building, with plenty of proper charcoal barbecue action, stone cold saki and enough chicken gizzards to scare anyone!
The decor is muted, bare wood and subtle lantern lighting. Candles line the point where the walls meet the floor. You can have a table with a river view or sit at the long, low counter facing the open kitchen.
The menu is divided into chicken skewers, stuff that comes on skewers that isn’t chicken, soups, salads and whole fish dishes. The skewers are roughly tapas sized (Spanish tapas, not the bloated half-dishes you get in most English tapas bars) – so we’re talking about 3 bites per item.
Outr favourites were the lamb – soft and tender with a deliciously juicy, smoky taste – the Japanese pickels and the whole barbecued horse mackerel. There’s plenty of vegetable options too, including mushroom skewers and onion skewers, and also several ways of including rice, from a grilled ricecake to a risotto style dish.
Scarier parts of the menu include “chicken gizzard”, and the eerie note “Other parts of chicken are available on request” – (eyeballs? feathers?).
Bincho’s sake range is big, with plenty of variety, inclusing a £125 bottle where the rice has been polished to a quarter of its original size (does this make it better? I would hope so).
Service was friendly and helpful, ably explaining the various parts of a Japanese meal and the proper way to serve and drink sake.
We weren’t particularly watchign what we ate, and our bill came to £45,. That included £12 worth of Asahi beer and 12% service. A bargain!