The grill glows orange in front of me before the meat arrives. It’s a small thing, set into the counter at my single seat, and it hums faintly under the chatter of the room. No flame. No charcoal. Just a low electric warmth I can feel rising toward my face.
A plate comes. Thin slices of beef, laid out like pages — tongue, skirt steak, short plate — each one marbled with fine threads of fat. I pick up a slice with the tongs and lay it on the grill. It takes a second. Then the sizzle starts, quiet at first, building as the fat begins to render. The smell reaches me a beat later — that deep, toasted beef aroma that always seems to arrive before the taste does.
This is Yakiniku Like, tucked into the busy stretch near Somerset MRT Station, where Orchard Road moves fast and nobody lingers long. The counter is built for people like me, eating alone. One seat, one grill, one plate. You cook your own meat at your own pace, and nobody hurries you, though the room is moving quickly all around.
The grill is the thing I keep thinking about. Yakiniku has always been a shared act — a charcoal pit in the middle of a table, smoke curling up into everyone’s clothes, friends reaching over each other to turn the meat. It’s one of those rituals that makes Japanese food feel communal before you’ve even taken a bite. The smoke was part of it. You carried it home in your hair. Here, the electric grill takes that away. It’s smokeless, clean, efficient. I’ll step back onto Orchard Road in a few minutes and smell of nothing at all.
There’s something quietly strange about that. The whole ritual of yakiniku was built around company, around the slow shared work of grilling and talking. Now it’s been folded down into a single seat, a single grill, a meal you can finish in twenty minutes between errands. The intimacy hasn’t vanished. It’s just turned inward. Instead of cooking for the table, I’m cooking only for myself, paying attention to one slice at a time, deciding when it’s done by the colour of the edge.
I lift the skirt steak off the moment it curls. It’s still soft in the middle, the fat gone glassy. I dip it, eat it, reach for the next. There’s a rhythm to it that I didn’t expect to find alone — a small, contained focus, the kind you don’t usually get in a place this close to a mall.
Maybe that’s the trade. We’ve given up the smoke and the crowd for speed and a clean shirt. Something is lost in that. But something is also offered back: a quiet half-hour, a grill that asks nothing of you except attention, a meal that belongs entirely to you.
I finish the last slice and watch the grill dim. The room keeps moving. I sit a moment longer than I need to, in no hurry to rejoin it.
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