"Date: 30th August 2024 Cost: £110 tip for two I’d wanted to come back to Bincho ever since the very first beautiful mouthful of my first visit. Those juicy, tender, skewered salty morsels had been consuming my every waking thought since, and like the most depraved of addicts I had been concocting increasingly vile and nefarious plans to ensure a return. So it was that I felt no guilt manipulating Dad into coming down here for our latest father son meal out instead of going up to see him in London, reverse engineering aspects of the visit he’d particularly like in order to paint the suggestion as thoughtful and personal: “you’ll really like it: it’s a grilled meats place and we can go for a nice walk along the seafront to get there; there’s a good selection of Japanese whisky too!” What I’ve been in knowing self denial over for years is that in fact Dad and I are very similar in a lot of ways, and so I probably overthought the planning stage he loved the place almost as much as I did. From repeated mentions of having the best seats in the house (a view through to the grill without sitting directly at the bar) despite an insistence that he’s no longer bothered about where he sits, to praise of the service and a positive commentary on the decor, lighting and “a nice level of busy ness”, it was almost as though he was trying to tell me without using the word itself, for fear of bringing up years of historical familial ridicule at his use and pronunciation of it that Bincho has that what he looks for in a restaurant almost more than decent scran: ambience. Though I do love the bustle and the low lights against the blackness of every surface, several with specials scrawled into them in chalk; the empty bottles of Yamazaki adorning the perimeter wall shelves; the noises and aromas that emanate from the kitchen and the ridiculous efficiency of the staff, I normally need the food itself to be outstanding to warrant a second visit somewhere. Fortunately at Bincho, it is. We got a couple of the beer snacky veggie starters to buy Dad a bit of time with the menu. The Korean cucumbers benefited from a chopping and a tossing a change from last time and the pickles disappeared as frustratingly quickly as ever, meaning that Dad let me take the lead when our patient waitress came to clear our plates and ask again if we were ready to order. The great thing about a simple concept done well and to great variety as the yakitori is here is that you can just order to taste, in stages, again and again, until you can’t order any more. And so we did. Chicken skin, chicken meatball (with egg yolk dip), salmon, shrimp and teriyaki miso pork yakitori were all sampled across the evening, the latter two of that chalk scrawled specials menu. To accompany we had the hipsi cabbage, also from the specials and mercifully still available from last time but ordered just the once this time; a lamb chop (nice, but the yakitori were all better); a kind of creamy broccoli (the only thing approaching disappointing); and an almost stupidly good sea bream tempura, the fish flaky and meaty, the curling batter light and crispy entirely unnecessary but somehow otherworldly and potentially the highlight. I felt like I could have kept going, personally, but I concede it was probably for the best to forego the Japanese whisky and have that seafront walk, the only issue being the fresh sea air, so devoid of meaty smoke, sobering me up quickly enough that I couldn’t help but start thinking about my next hit."
Cucumber Salad
