Last night I was in heaven – I had some seriously scrumptious yakitori at Bincho in Soho. I can’t even remember the last time I had decent yakitori. It must have been the last time I was in Japan, actually.

Pictured you can see the ‘Seven Samurai’ – a variety of seven different skewers for £10. Ordering yakitori on it’s on costs from £2 and each portion comes with just two skewers. I even had to pay £2 for a cup of green tea. Sometimes I hate London but what can you do?

I liked the décor of the place. It was atmospheric without being too dark, hard a number of photographs on the far wall and everywhere else you could see massive bottles of nihonshu on display. We sat towards the back of the restaurant, too far away from those beautiful aromas emanating from those red-hot coals.

We decided that our waitress wasn’t Japanese going by her mannerisms. Later on when she repeated our order she had a perfect Japanese accent: of course she turned out to be Japanese. After we realised our waitress was Japanese my Japanese friend naturally switched to talking in Japanese. I typically stuck to English!

At the end of our meal my friend started to say something to the waitress, ‘Anoo… ‘ Then he started gesturing wildly with his hands and became really flustered. I wondered if he’d decided to order something else but he eventually said uncertainly, ‘okanjyou???’ It turned out that he hadn’t asked for the bill in Japanese in so long that he went blank and was totally unsure what word to use! He was so embarrassed but it was a priceless moment!

Anyway, back to the yakitori. Strangely there was no choice of shio (salt) or tare (sauce) but it was delicious all the same. The yaki-onigiri (grilled rice ball coated in soy-sauce) was delicous – but why did it come with nori?

Apparently the food is much cheaper on Mondays. I’ll see you there!