Eat Tanjong Pagar Wagyu at Yakiniku Heijoen
“You know what I feel like eating tonight?”
“Does it happen to be the wagyu place we just walked by?”
Yakiniku Heijoen tl;dr
- Japanese Grill It Yourself Restaurant
- All You Can Eat Aged A5 Black Cow Wagyu
- Available Salads, Seafood, and Other Side Dishes
- Make Reservations for Ken’s Table
Change is good!
It’s kind of like when we moved to Singapore. I never realized how small the world I lived in till I moved to Singapore. Sure I’ve been to Singapore before, but traveling through a place is vastly different from actually setting up roots somewhere and exploring the finer intricacies of a location’s history, people, and culture.
While a lot of things were familiar to me, yet at the same time everything is different and new. It’s been eye opening as to what I once took for granted from retail to people and to food. But with all changes, comes the need to explore and adapt and take the bad with the good.
Beef is Good, Wagyu is Better
Then you enter this world of WAGYU! I love meat and I love love even better meat more so! I mean, if I love something that’s good, then something better is going to be even better! Right? And who doesn’t like better anything?
I would love to tell you that I knew this place that I just saw called Yakiniku Heijoen was an institution in Japan with a chain of wagyu restaurants. I’d love to tell you that I knew that they take special care to select their black haired cows from all over Japan and age them to tender perfection. And to sweeten the meat, I’d love to tell you that I knew that there was different grades of wagyu, which they offer the best of the best A5 grade wagyu.
But I’d be lying if I said any of that as if I was some kind of wagyu guru. The things I didn’t know about beef, much less Japanese beef is staggering:
- I didn’t know anything about wagyu.
- I didn’t know whether I’d love this place.
- And I didn’t know that by the end of the night, that I’d be calling our server, Ken, the God of Meat!
3 All You Can Eat Yakiniku Dinner Courses
- BEEF Course | 35 items at around 70 minutes for $39.90 SGD
- RICH Course | 46 items at around 90 minutes for $49.90 SGD
- PREMIUM Course | 61 items at around 90 minutes for $59.90 SGD ($49.90 SGD @ lunch)
3 courses for different preferences and different budgets. It’s good to have options, but let’s be honest with ourselves…
No one is coming here to order anything other than the All You Can Eat Premium Wagyu Course.
If you’re not here primarily for the wagyu then I’m pretty sure there are cheaper options out there that are centered around Japanese beef.
More Than Just Beef
Beef is great but I said previously that options are good for you. With that being said, let me be clear that they don’t only serve wagyu here. They have tons of of other options:
- Vegetables
- Seafood
- Rice
- Noodles
Between you and me, I don’t eat a lot of the other non wagyu offerings at Yakiniku Heijoen. I’ve tried some of the the soups, shrimp, scallops, salads that Nadia ordered and I can say that they were good. But nothing quite compares to wagyu, especially after paying for the Premium All You Can Eat course.
When I’m out, I’m just not heavy on salads because it just takes up valuable space best reserved for wagyu and more wagyu. But do yourself a favor and order the kimchi.
Acidic kimchi helps cut the rich wagyu so you can eat more wagyu!
Enter Wagyu Extravaganza
Now on to the main course and the real reason you came! After being seated in the dimly lit dark interior of spartan decor and functional grills we waited for our server to take our order. We double downed on the Premium course and our server Ken explained the different meat cuts:
- Wagyu Kalbi
- Wagyu Harami
- Black Angus Misuji
- Beef Tongue and more!
And then there’s the different meat preparations:
- Garlic Salt
- Sweet BBQ Sauce
- Spicy BBQ Sauce and more!
I was so hungry that I don’t remember all the differences in particular. I’m much more of a visceral hands on person and needed to simply try EVERYTHING! And I’ve found that everything is delicious. To be fair, toward the end of our 90 minute meal, Nadia and I started tapering off the sauce laden preparations and ordered namely the cleaner tasting Garlic Salt.
Consider trying as much as you can at least once.
Know that chicken, in general, takes a long time to cook.
If you’re paying for the premium wagyu course, focus on wagyu!
Do It Yourself
There isn’t much to explain regarding cooking. There’s you, the meat, and a grill. You cook the beef yourself. Given that you literally have keys to the meat kingdom, here’s your time to shine and try it all.
Try experimenting with cooking the different cuts to see which level of wellness appeals to your taste buds the most. If you like it medium or less cooked then just leave it on the grill for a short while till it’s seared to your specific flavor of brown and then eat it (watch out, it’ll be tongue scalding, mouth burning hot).
In my travels, I can testify to the solid cooking advice of grilling the thin fat marbled slices less to maximize Umami taste!
You want Umami!
You NEED UMAMI!
Thanks Ken
Ken, the God of Meat! He brought out plate after plate after plate of wagyu. He brought out every cut of every wagyu in every flavor for Nadia and I to try. Yes, he did bring out other dishes too but at the end of the night, we ate our weight in wagyu. Hell, he even brought out another plate of wagyu without us asking for it.
Bordering exploding from over consumption, we called it an early night yet he, because his faith in me, Ken brought out yet another plate of tender marbled wagyu. His faith did not go unrewarded.
Nadia left it all to me to finish and I ate it all up in no time flat.
And I enjoyed every excruciating meat sweat inducing, artery clogging, palate overwhelming moment of it!
Change is Good
Beef is good! Eating is great! It’s even better when you’re hungry! Eating wagyu is a culinary adventure into the emotional unknown. Any changes from the norm is a sense of adventure that can go either way. That type of minimal risk is thrilling exploration into the unknown.
Sure, it’s good to know that you’re going somewhere is going to be awesome, but when you’re not too sure then who knows what will happen. When it’s bad, then it’s simply chalked up for not having known before hand. And when it’s good, it’s mind blowing! Yakinuku Heijoen is MIND BLOWING!
Yakiniku Heijoen
- Level 3 Tras St 100am, 100 Tras St, Singapore 079027
- +65 6538 2981
Where do you like to go for Japanese Wagyu in Singapore?!?!?
