Restaurant Review: Yardbird

Location: Bridges Street, Sheung Wan

Type of food: yakitori

Rating: *** (3 out of 5)

Yardbird, literally translated, means chicken in Japanese. The restaurant is so named  because it serves yakitori, or grilled chicken skewers. Yakitori is a popular bar snack in Japan, especially for salary-men who want to blow off steam by breathing in barbeque smoke. But at Yardbird, opened last summer in an up-and-coming neighborhood off Hollywood Road, bar food is dressed up as a delicacy.

Yardbird in Sheung Wan

At the tender age of 23, Canadian chef Matt Abergel was offered a job at Masa, the ultra high-end sushi restaurant in Midtown Manhattan that Forbes magazine ranked the most expensive restaurant in America for five consecutive years. Abergel was the sorcerer’s apprentice to celebrity chef Masayoshi Takayama, who taught him a thing or two about Japanese cooking and everything about charging exorbitant prices for it. With Masa on his CV, the boy wonder moved to Hong Kong two years ago and became Executive Chef at Zuma, a bankers’ hangout at the Landmark. Last July, Abergel felt ready to go on his own and opened Yardbird to huge fanfare. 

Every magazine and food critic in the city has raved about it. Time Out even gave it an unprecedented full-star review and named it “best newcomer of 2011.” Then again, in the same Time Out review that conferred the restaurant a five-star rating, the food columnist writes, "Small touches abound [at Yardbird] – jars to discard skewer sticks and a diner style drinks board." To be impressed by such ordinary objects present in every yakitori-ya is like being wowed by a lazy susan in a Chinese restaurant. Sometimes you have to wonder the credentials and impartiality of these reviewers.

Chef and entrepreneur Matt Abergel

Yardbird is hip, sassy and it doesn’t take reservations. It is the it-place, the talk-of-the-town and the flavor-of-the-month. It is where the in-crowd comes to see and be seen, where gweilo customers high-five waiters and waitresses (I actually saw that) and where early birds get the worm and all others get turned away. The waiting staff is mostly expats – American or Asian American – who are friendly and knowledgeable about the menu. Quite rare for Hong Kong, they all seem to love their job probably because they are tipped well. They also look uniformly attractive. “I guess good-looking kids… just hang out together,” Abergel recently told a magazine, sounding more like a store manager at Abercrombie & Fitch than a young chef. 

Staff toasting to another "cha-ching" night

I have two problems with Yardbird. First, it is extremely noisy. I don’t mean noisy like a Sunday morning at a dim sum restaurant. I mean noisy as in the stereo is blasting 80s hip-hop music while customers and staff shout over each other in a tenement building that echoes like a cave. But many of my younger friends actually like it and call that “good vibes.” Call me old-fashioned then, for I still like my dinner conversation. At Yardbird, I kept pointing at my ear and mouthing “I can’t hear you” to my guest sitting across from me.

Second, Yardbird will break your piggy bank. My guest and I spent $1,700 (including tips) on an okay dinner for two. That includes, among other things, a $180 salad and a $140 plate of bite-sized fried chicken. If you want to drop that kind of cash on a meal, you are better off doing it at Lung King Heen or Mandarin Grill, where real food (not bar snacks) are prepared with real ingredients (not chicken skin and bone) by real chefs (not some kids flipping skewered meat on the barbeque like they do in Shek O).

Not exactly wallet-friendly

Overall, the food at Yardbird is on the salty side and almost every dish is either deep fried or grilled. The only memorable items on the menu are sweet corn tempura and Korean fried cauliflower with a gimmicky name “KFC." At the end of the day, however, grilled chicken is always just grilled chicken, no matter how much you dress it up.