What Is Karubi? Yakiniku's Rib Cut, Explained

One line on our Hamilton Road menu reads BLACKMORE FULL BLOOD WAGYU KARUBI MB9+, and underneath it: “200g full blood wagyu short ribs, 600-day grain-fed, truffle ponzu jus, salad”. People ask about the MB9+ — we have answered that in what MB4+ and MB9+ actually mean. Fewer people ask about the word in the middle, and it is the more interesting one, because in Japan, where every yakiniku menu prints it, karubi is not officially the name of any cut of beef at all.

The word is Korean, and it means “rib”

Galbi is the Korean word for rib, and in Korean cooking it names grilled ribs — traditionally beef short ribs or pork spare ribs, often marinated in soy sauce, garlic and sugar, with ginger and sesame. Marinated galbi is yangnyeom-galbi; unmarinated is saeng-galbi.

Japan’s yakiniku restaurants grew out of Korean ones, and they took the dish and its name with them. Rendered in Japanese katakana, galbi becomes karubi. We have told the story of how yakiniku differs from yakitori and robatayaki in a separate post; the short version is that yakiniku is beef you grill yourself at the table, and karubi is the cut that yakiniku rooms are built around.

In Japan, “karubi” is a menu word, not a butcher’s word

This is the part most people never hear. Japan’s Ministry of Agriculture, Forestry and Fisheries sets a retail quality standard for meat that divides beef into eleven main parts, and karubi is not one of them. In February 2023 Radio Kansai put the question to the National Yakiniku Association, whose answer was, in our translation: “Karubi is not actually a specific cut. It does not appear among the 11 officially designated parts.” The association described it as a menu designation.

In practice, karubi on a Japanese menu usually means beef from the belly or the rib area — bara, the fatty meat between and around the ribs. But because nothing regulates it, a restaurant can put a different fatty cut under the same word. The same is true of the grades you see printed above it: jo-karubi (“superior”) and tokujo-karubi (“extra superior”) have no defined standard, and each restaurant decides for itself what earns the label.

So if you have ever ordered karubi at two yakiniku restaurants and received two quite different pieces of meat, nobody was cheating you. The word promised you something fatty from roughly the rib region, and both of them kept that promise.

What a short rib actually is

The English term is more precise, though not by as much as you might expect. Short ribs can be taken from the brisket, chuck, plate or rib areas; the muscle that defines them runs across most of the rib cage. They are sold two main ways:

English cut — cut parallel to the bone, leaving a thick block of meat sitting on one length of rib.
Flanken cut — cut across the bones into thin strips, each with several small cross-sections of rib in it. This is the cut the English-speaking world often calls “Korean-style ribs”, and its best-known version, LA galbi, is widely credited to Korean immigrants in Los Angeles between the 1960s and the 1980s, adapting to how American butchers sold whole racks.

There is also boneless short rib, cut from the chuck or plate and separated from the bone. Short rib is usually thought of as a braising cut, because it is hard-working meat with plenty of connective tissue — but it is also grilled fast, which is exactly what galbi and yakiniku do with it, sliced thin enough that the fat renders before the meat toughens.

What our menu promises, which is more than a Japanese menu has to

Because the Japanese word promises so little, the useful thing about our menu line is the description underneath it, which pins the word down:

“full blood wagyu” — one hundred per cent wagyu genetics, not a cross. Blackmore, the producer, farms in the Victorian high country at Alexandra and describes its herd as fullblood wagyu “not diluted with any other breed”.
“short ribs” — the cut is named, in English, on the card. On our menu karubi means short rib and nothing else.
“600-day grain-fed” — Blackmore’s own site describes a finishing period of 600-plus days in a low-density feedlot, after the calves’ early months on pasture.
“200g” — the portion is stated, which a yakiniku menu, selling by the plate, often does not do in the same way.

Two honest limits. First, the MB9+ is a grade of the carcass, not of the piece on your plate: Blackmore says its carcasses are graded under the AUS-MEAT system, assessed at the 10th/11th rib between the cube roll and the striploin — that is, in the ribeye, not in the short rib. A high marbling score there tells you about the animal; it does not measure the short rib directly. Our grading post explains why that single measuring point matters. Second, our menu does not say whether the short rib is cut English-style or flanken, so we are not going to tell you either — ask your server on the night.

Karubi, but not yakiniku

We are not a yakiniku restaurant, and our karubi does not arrive raw for you to grill. The kitchen cooks it on the charcoal grill that our About page describes as the place where cuts of meat meet smoky charcoal, and it reaches the table as a plated dish with a salad and a truffle ponzu jus — the same jus that goes on our Angus ribeye MB4+. Ponzu’s citrus acidity is doing a job against the fat; if you want to know what is in the sauce family, we wrote up ponzu on its own.

That makes it the one classic yakiniku cut on a menu that is otherwise Japanese–Middle Eastern, and it carries the highest marbling grade on the card. For a table sharing plates it works best as one dish among several rather than as anybody’s main course. For how it compares with four other ways of eating wagyu in the city, see where wagyu is worth the money in Singapore.

What it costs

The Hamilton Road food menu prints no prices, for this dish or any other, so we will not print one here either. Your server will tell you, and the menu is online if you want to see the rest of the Biggies before you book a table. And if karubi is your way into Japanese food more generally, our full guide to Japanese food in Singapore is the place to start.

Sources

Our own Hamilton Road food menu (the karubi line quoted verbatim).
Wikipedia, “Galbi” and “Short ribs” (etymology, cuts, LA galbi).
Radio Kansai Topics (Raditopi), 27 February 2023 — the National Yakiniku Association on karubi and the eleven official beef parts (our translation).
Japanese Wikipedia, “Karubi” (retail standard does not regulate the term; jo- and tokujo- grades undefined).
Blackmore Wagyu, “Our Wagyu” (location, feeding, AUS-MEAT grading at the 10th/11th rib).

Habibi-san