Review: Robata, Soho

Today we fancied an izakaya. There’s a good one called Flesh & Buns towards Covent Garden (review here) but we decided to try somewhere new and widen our options: Robata, named for the coal-fired grills used for cooking yakitori sticks.

The sticks we chose were: lamb belly, Iberico pork, king oyster mushroom, sweetcorn. The lamb belly was well flavoured, but inconsistently grilled with one of the skewered bitterly blackened towards the end. The pork was better, although by contrast perhaps not as charred as it could be. The mushroom was either an old specimen or not well trimmed, because there was some jolly leathery bits that took some solid mastication to get through. The sweetcorn was nicely charred and then coasted in wasabi-pea crumbs. Interesting idea, but I actually don’t think they added to the pleasure of a corn on the cob. Also, I get that the corn was cooked and grilled in advance, but it would still have been a better experience served warmer than room temperature.

We had karaage chicken as a snack. I liked the gochujang mayo it came with, but the batter on the chicken was deep brown and properly thick, like you’d get on a piece of cod from an adequate fish-n-chip shop, and the chicken inside was… not dry, okay, but hardly succulent. It was fine. The best dish was the side of kimchi rice topped with a fried egg, yummy.

This lot was about £32 each before drinks, but it was also a modest meal – we could have eaten more. I’ll be heading to Flesh & Buns when I want an izakaya, and will be giving Robata a miss.