Dine with design at Yatai
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I don’t usually swot-up on the abstract principles of pre-war German architectural theory before dining out, but on this occasion I felt I had to.
New Aberdeen boutique hotel Bauhaus has built its foundations on it. It’s named after the Bauhaus school of design, which blossomed in the 20s and 30s.
The aesthetic is all about turning fine craftsmanship into a distinctive art form, but without frills or fussy ornamentation. Aberdeen’s Bauhaus embraces these principles. From the outside, each floor level was lit with a different colour while striking sharp lines, stylish brick, chrome and functionality lay within.
A picture of the Bauhaus school’s founding father Walter Gropius stared out from a wall in the reception and I studied some of his musings. He believed design was the “stuff of life”. So is food, and this is another striking feature of the hotel. Clinically efficient German-style design blends with exotic and mysterious Japanese cuisine.
Bauhaus has linked up with award-winning chef John Jones’s Yatai Japanese Kitchen, which has moved from Skene Street to take up residence. A separate entrance sits next door at street level, but the restaurant is also linked internally to the hotel.
The street entrance to Yatai is somewhat draughty and industrial-looking with concrete stairs, but it is made more welcoming with mats and bamboo plants. A small certificate on a wall offers a clue to what is in store upstairs. It shows Mr Jones honed his skills studying in Akita, Japan.
The Bauhaus style continues in the dining room, combining sleek lines with simple furnishings. There is a bar area to the left, with dining tables to the right. It’s quite a contrast to the tight space Yatai occupied in Skene Street and the menu has also been given a sleek makeover.
The most eye-catching feature, however, was that it was like stepping straight into the kitchen. The open-plan design means that you can sit and watch Mr Jones and his team in action, with just a waist-high counter in between you and them. You can hear the timers and calls of “service” to the waiters.
My wife and I had a table close to the kitchen, although some diners had prime positions on stools resting by the counter and within touching distance of the chefs. It’s a great idea. It creates an intimate atmosphere and a bond with the kitchen, not to mention sporadic warm blasts of air.
The restaurant also boasts the first Japanese dining pit in Aberdeen, where up to 10 diners can sit around a table at floor level.
Think of Spanish tapas and you have a clue to how Japanese food is presented. There are tasty dishes which you order as you go along. You do not have to wait long because the exquisite bites are small, or thinly-sliced.
People might be put off by sushi, or slices of raw fish, but there are many more dishes which are chargrilled and pan or deep fried. Everything on the menu had an English translation and the helpful and friendly staff were excellent guides.
We started with four selections from the otsumami (or small dish) menu. We chose steamed soya beans sprinkled with salt, which we could pick at in a bowl, and traditional miso soup in a small cup. The starting selection was completed with chargrilled seafood salad and kaisen shumai – steam-fried dumplings stuffed with seafood and Japanese herbs. They were beautifully presented, with salmon, scallops and prawns arranged around a steel bowl, with the salad as the centrepiece. The dumplings were generously filled and both came with tasty dips.
We also sampled traditional rice wine saki in attractive small glass flasks and received some etiquette tips on how we should politely fill each other’s glasses, as is Japanese tradition.
Deep-Fried Black Tiger Prawns, crispy chicken crackers with Japanese salt and deep-fried soft-shell crabs, with a seaweed salad and a wasabi mayonnaise dip followed. The prawns were cloaked in the most delicate of light and fluffy battered coatings. The row of small crabs, complete with legs, was the star of the show and, as they were so soft, we could eat everything with no messy picking.
It was almost time to bow out of the proceedings, but not before finishing off with a selection of grilled skewers – beef with teriyaki sauce coating, pork belly with mustard miso, corn-fed chicken thigh meat with teriyaki sauce and duck breast. A delicious way to round it off and, needless to say, there was no room for puddings. It had been a great night and we even managed to master chop sticks. It was a relaxing atmosphere and the service was consistently high even when it became busy. Our bill came to just under £70.
I had just about grasped Bauhaus design theory, but remembered that someone in the hotel had told me that Yatai also knocks out fry-ups for hotel guests in the morning – now that really was a difficult concept to come to terms with after what we had feasted on.
Yatai Japanese Kitchen at the Bauhaus Hotel, Langstane Place, Aberdeen. Telephone 01224 212122.
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