At the same time that my brother saw Bincho Yakitori at the OXO Tower I saw its sister restaurant in Soho and we both agreed we wanted to check out this yakitori restaurant. The main reason I wanted to go? The promise of char-grilled food. Yummy.

Patrick decided to book the OXO Tower restaurant for a meal this evening. The restaurant, located on the second floor or is it third as I got a bit confused when Patrick too me on a strange path past many cool designer (mod cons not clothes) shops, has great views of the river though the scaffolding currently surrounding the building marred this view a little bit tonight.

The menu at Bincho is split helpfully into appetisers and side dishes, soups, salads, grills (yakitori, kushiyaki and yakimono) and rice dishes. The focus is, naturally, on the skewer dishes (the yakitori and kushiyaki) which I was looking forward to sampoling.

It reminds me of like Japanese Tapas or Japanese yum-cha with smallish dishes which allows you to select a wide-variety of different flavours. They suggest that for two people a couple of side dishes and 3-4 skewers is good to start with and if you’re still hungry you can order more.

We got a bit greedy and ended up with three sides, five skewers and rice (including yaki-onigiri: a grilled rice cake with seaweed and soy.) This actually was quite filling though that didn’t stop us going for dessert as well.

For sides we had Ohitashi (Cooked and marinated baby spinach with sesame), Mehikari (Fried white fish with seven spices) and Tori tatsu-age (Fried marinated chicken with ponzu) – all good dishes with the batter on the fish and chicken being light and crispy.

From the grilled menu we went for the Mune shishito (Chicken breast with shishito pepper), Uzurabacon (Quail egg and bacon), Buta (Pork belly) Unagi (Eel) and Nasu (Aubergine with sesame and
miso.) All were cooked perfectly, very soft and tender and juicy. The pork belly in particularly was perfect and captured the smokiness of the grill perfectly.

Individually the dishes are quite reasonably priced though as every little dish adds up the meal can end up being quite expensive if you get carried away. Though in my experience this tends to happen at any tapas meal so it shouldn’t have been unexpected. Service at Bincho was friendly and efficient. The interior of the restaurant is dark and welcoming. Not a bad place for a meal.