Yakiniku vs Yakitori vs Robatayaki, Explained

Three words turn up on Singapore menus as though they were decorative variations on “Japanese grill”. They are not. They describe three different evenings, with different animals, different fires and different people doing the cooking — and the quickest way to tell them apart has nothing to do with the food.

It is: who is holding the tongs?

Yakitori — they cook, it is chicken, it is on a stick

Yakitori is chicken cooked on a skewer over a charcoal fire and seasoned with tare or salt. The bird is fractionated: momo thigh, mune breast, sasami inner breast, kawa skin, tebasaki wing, bonjiri tail, nankotsu cartilage, hatsu heart, rebā liver, sunagimo gizzard, negima chicken with spring onion, tsukune meatballs. Each part is its own order at its own price.

The word also gets stretched. It “sometimes refers to kushiyaki (grilled and skewered foods) in general”, which is why a shop selling you pork belly and asparagus may still call itself a yakitori place. We go into that, and into what the stick is actually for, in our guide to skewers and the Japanese grill tradition.

What matters for this comparison: you order, somebody else grills. The fire is behind a counter and it is somebody’s job.

Yakiniku — you cook, it is beef, it is at your table

Yakiniku literally means “grilled meat”, and it is the odd one out here because the diner does the cooking. Bite-size meat — usually beef and offal — plus vegetables go onto a grill built into your table, a few pieces at a time, and you manage them yourself.

The history is more interesting than the format. Present-day yakiniku restaurants derive from Korean restaurants that opened in Osaka and Tokyo around 1945, and the cooking draws heavily on Korean dishes like bulgogi and galbi. The word took a stranger route: it was popularised in 1872 by the writer Kanagaki Robun in a handbook of Western food, where it meant Western barbecue, and only later attached itself to Korean-derived cooking during the early Shōwa period. It became the standard term in the 1960s, and it is said to have been adopted as a compromise in a political conflict — the alternative, Chōsen ryōri, had become impossible to use neutrally once Korea was divided. A whole cuisine ended up filed under a deliberately bland label.

The cuts are beef-forward: loin, karubi short rib, tan tongue, pork belly, and horumon — offal such as liver, intestines and heart, the word borrowed from Kansai dialect.

And note what the sauce is doing, because this is a real distinction rather than a trivia point. Yakiniku tare is soy sauce mixed with sake, mirin, sugar, garlic, fruit juice and sesame, and it sits in a bowl for you to dip into after cooking. Yakitori tare is a glaze applied at the fire. Same word, opposite job: one is a condiment, the other is a cooking step.

Robatayaki — they cook, over an open hearth, and it is mostly from the sea

Robatayaki translates as “fireside-cooking”, and the fire is the whole idea. It is described as a method in which items are cooked at varying speeds over hot charcoal — not on a compact box grill but on a wide, flat open fireplace in the style of an irori, the sunken hearth of a traditional Japanese house, rather than a shichirin or a similar small charcoal implement. If you have read our piece on the konro, robata is the opposite end of that scale: not a narrow trench built for skewers but a broad open bed you can sit around.

It comes from a centuries-old country style of cooking by northern Japanese fishermen around a communal hearth. Wikipedia’s account adds a detail worth repeating precisely because it is about their boats and not our kitchen: the fishermen traditionally used binchōtan coals encased in a stone box, to protect the boat from the heat. The first robata restaurant opened in Sendai, Miyagi Prefecture; by 1965 there were over ten thousand of them nationwide, and Kushiro in Hokkaido is still known for the style.

What arrives is typically seafood and vegetables. The grill sits centrally with customers around it, and in Japan a robata room often functions as an izakaya — a drinking establishment, traded on nostalgia.

The four questions that separate them

Who holds the tongs? Yakiniku: you. Yakitori and robatayaki: them.
What animal? Yakitori: the bird, exhaustively. Yakiniku: beef and offal. Robatayaki: mostly the sea.
What shape is the fire? Yakiniku: a small grill set into your table, so the fire is furniture. Robatayaki: a wide flat hearth you sit around, so the fire is the room. Yakitori: neither — the fire is a work station behind a counter.
What is the sauce doing? Yakiniku: waiting in a bowl for after. Yakitori: on the food, at the fire, or replaced entirely by salt.

Answer those four and you can name any Japanese grill room in Singapore from the doorway, whatever the signage says.

So which one are we? None of them — and it matters that we say so

Habibi-san is an izakaya with a charcoal grill. That is a different axis from the three formats above, and we set out how it differs from a restaurant and from a bar in a separate post. Nobody grills at your table in either of our rooms; our fire is a work station, and there is a grill section standing at it all night.

We borrow from the vocabulary honestly rather than decoratively. Li’l Habibi’s list is called kushiyaki and not yakitori, because chicken is a minority on it — the skewers run to Iberico jowl, beef chuck and mortadella. And one classic yakiniku cut does sit on the Hamilton Road card: wagyu karubi, the short rib that yakiniku rooms are built around, except that we cook it for you and it arrives as a plate rather than as raw material. What the grade on it means is its own conversation.

Two of these three formats are also, in their homeland, drinking formats, which is the thread running back to everything else here — and the reason a Middle Eastern kitchen could pick up a Japanese grill without the join showing. That argument, and the two skewer traditions that meet on our menus, are in from the kebab skewer to the yakitori stick.

Practical notes

We serve pork and alcohol at both venues and are not halal; the rest of the practical questions live in the FAQ. Hamilton Road is at 29 Hamilton Road, Jalan Besar, Tuesday to Sunday 5pm–11pm, with brunch Saturday and Sunday 11am–2.30pm. Li’l Habibi is at 55 Haji Lane, Singapore 189248, inside Bar Stories, Tuesday to Sunday 5.30pm–10.30pm, evenings only.

For the wider picture, start with the full guide to Japanese food in Singapore. Otherwise: the menus, the rooms and the grill, and a table.

Sources

Definitions, histories, dates, cuts and sauces are from Wikipedia’s articles on yakiniku, yakitori and robatayaki, all read on 8 September 2026. The binchōtan detail belongs to that account of robata fishermen and is not a claim about the fuel in our own grill, which our site and menu describe only as charcoal.