How I ate more Japanese A5 Wagyu than I ever had in my life — while being timed
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The most selfless act one human can do for another is to donate a kidney. But just slightly behind that is to offer a ride to the airport. And when a friend recently did that for me and my wife, unsolicited and without reservation, we were genuinely touched. I mean, crying-emoji touched. Because, dear reader, our friend wasn’t just going to take us to any old airport; she was going to drive us to LAX. From Orange County. On a Thursday. After work. During rush hour!
And if you already think our friend is a saint, it gets better. On the way to LAX, as her minivan inched along stop-and-go traffic on the 405 Freeway, she asked us to text her the details of our return flight! Yes, you read that right. She intended to pick us up, too! And when she did a few weeks later, she didn’t just sit idle at the cellphone waiting lot; she showed up at the Tom Bradley International Terminal to welcome us back. Hers was the first face we saw as we ascended the sloped walkway from U.S. Customs — and she was even backlit by a halo.
So how do you repay such kindness? Well, if that friend is a food lover, you propose dinner. And since we knew she had an affinity for red meat, we threw out suggestions to OC’s best steakhouses. Mastro’s? The Ranch?
“Anything you want!” we said.
Money was no object, because no matter what restaurant she chose, it’s nothing compared to the sacrifice of her time — not to mention the surge-priced roundtrip Uber fares we didn’t have to pay.
She ultimately picked Mikiya, an over-the-top, all-you-can-eat Wagyu shabu shabu chain with a location in Vegas that she’d seen on viral videos. It had just serendipitously opened its first Orange County location in Irvine last month.
If you haven’t heard of Mikiya or its parent company, Chubby Group, you probably should start being aware of them. Finance types are betting they’re going to be the next Darden for high-end Asian restaurants. As it stands, they’re already a bonafide conglomerate with more than 40 restaurants operating under 20 brands across the United States.
In Southern California alone, there are at least 10 Chubby Group eateries, including Chubby Cattle and Wagyu Factory in Orange County, an all-you-can-eat Wagyu yakiniku and hot pot restaurant, respectively.
Mikiya is only marginally different from those two. As a Japanese shabu shabu restaurant, you’re boiling the marbled beef at Mikiya, instead of grilling it at Chubby Cattle. And at Mikiya you only get four broth choices instead of the six that make Wagyu Factory more of a Chinese hot pot joint.
This leaves the thing they all have in common — the seemingly endless supply of Wagyu. How did they manage to commoditize this luxury ingredient? The answer: Pricing power through exclusive partnerships with actual cattle ranches, eliminating the middleman and making Chubby Group not only the Walmart of Wagyu but also, according to its website, the largest importer of Japanese Wagyu in the U.S.
But that doesn’t mean it was going to be cheap. After all, this is still Japanese A5 Wagyu beef, which retails for about $100 to $250 per pound on the open market. Mikiya isn’t just going to give it away to a customer base of human bottomless pits for one fixed price. Enter its three-tiered pricing model in levels dubbed Silver, Gold and Diamond.
If you think it sounds complicated, you don’t know the half of it. There are actually two quoted prices per tier. One price is for the general public, and the other is for members of a so-called “Chubby Club,” a paid loyalty program that grants the bearer lower entry fees at each level. Membership also comes with additional perks and rewards so labyrinthine, it would be easier to explain the intricacies of health insurance benefits and co-pays during open enrollment. And I haven’t even mentioned that Chubby Group also offers NFTs.
So for the sake of simplicity, I will just tell you about the regular, non-member prices going forward.
Silver is the cheapest at $55 per person, which does not, in fact, entitle you to eat any Japanese A5 Wagyu at all. Instead, you are relegated to cheaper cuts of Australian Wagyu, you peasant! The $78 Gold level allows you to access all the choices of the Silver plus some Japanese A5 Wagyu — but at only one order per person. At the $98 Diamond level, you get everything a Silver and Gold gets, but now there’s no limit on how many A5 pieces you can eat.
Scratch that.
There is actually a limit. And it’s an important one: all tiers must be completed within a 90-minute window. At this point you might ask, “But do they actually keep track?” You bet they do. The clock starts when you submit your first order, and at the 80-minute mark, the servers will remind you that your time is running out.
What happens if you remain unsatiated after your allotted hour and a half? I do not know. I was thoroughly and uncomfortably full by the 80-minute warning. My wife was done at about the 60-minute mark. And our friend tapped out after 70 uninterrupted minutes of shoving pieces of A5 Wagyu in her mouth. But for all the Takeru Kobayashi wannabes out there, the fine print does note that the restaurant levies a 20% surcharge for every additional 30 minutes you go over time. There’s also a $6-per-plate charge for any items left uneaten.
But let’s rewind to the beginning of the night when we arrived. Since I knew I’d be consuming more meat in one sitting than I do in a week, I starved myself the entire day. Like I do before any trip to a churrascaria, I factored into account the pounds of premium cow I must eat before I tip the balance sheet to my favor. Mikiya’s 90-minute limit was just another variable to the equation — a challenge to be met.
So I was primed and ready when I walked into the building that, up until April of 2024, was a Chili’s restaurant. But immediately, upon entering, I became disoriented. The place where I’d previously spent countless happy hours downing sugary margaritas and bottomless baskets of chips was now transformed into a dreamlike space straight out of the 2010 Christopher Nolan movie “Inception.” The ceiling was covered in mirrors, so that the reflection of a dining room with hidden passageways, curvy Japanese roofs and red neon — not unlike O-Ren Ishii’s lair from “Kill Bill” — appeared to be stacked on top of itself.
Mikiya’s penchant for the theatrical didn’t end there. Next to an automated rice dispenser no one seemed to use, dry ice smoke poured out from the vegetable and cold foods buffet as if a showstopping Broadway diva solo was about to start. At the entrance, snow-white slabs of fat-marbled Wagyu beef stood in freezers. They served as a visual warning that what we were about to devour in large quantities wasn’t just sinfully rich and expensive; it would wreck our cholesterol levels and possibly induce gout.
Less than five minutes after placing our order, all the food appeared almost simultaneously. Thin slices of raw Japanese A5 Wagyu chuck ribeye, brisket and shoulder were stacked on plates that rose to the top of our heads. When the Wagyu bone marrow came, our friend scraped it off with one swoop of her spoon and smeared it on toast as though it was softened butter.
And because we opted for the Diamond Experience, it unlocked an artfully arranged iced seafood platter that rivaled Mastro’s famed tower. Crammed edge-to-edge with raw shrimp, sliced white fish, quivering lobes of oyster, pristine diver scallop steaks, snow crab legs and, to my amazement, three precious pieces of abalone, there was at least $100 worth of product before me.
But like a nonstop game of Tetris, the dishes kept coming. There were carpaccios of thickly sliced salmon and tuna floating in pools of ponzu; freshly chopped tuna tartare hand rolls piled atop nori; and a sashimi boat loaded with generous cuts of fatty tuna belly. Most impressive of all was a plate of raw translucent sweet shrimp so perky and fresh, they had to have been dispatched only seconds earlier. Even my allergic-to-shrimp wife determined it was worth the Benadryl.
I was so focused on extracting every bit of succulence from them, even tonguing their head cavities, I realized I hadn’t even started on the Wagyu.
When I finally did, I told myself to slow down. As good as the seafood, sushi and sashimi were, the Japanese A5 Wagyu was the reason we were here. I took the first filament-thin piece and swished it around the scalding broth. It contracted upon contact. Then, as I stared at the wrinkled sheet of beef glistening on my chopstick, I knew I had to savor it, even if it meant just letting it melt on my tongue like a lozenge for a few seconds. But the thing about A5 beef is that it doesn’t want to stay in your mouth; it wants to disappear. You can and should chew it, but it’s not necessary. It was essentially ice cream.
As the evening wore on, the differences in tenderness between the A5 cuts became imperceptible. I paid less and less attention to whether it was the ribeye, the brisket or the shoulder. It mattered more whether I took it for a dunk in raw pasteurized egg, which amplified the silkiness of the meat, or the ponzu, which cut its richness.
At the 80-minute mark, with a distended tummy, surrounded by the detritus of perhaps the most decadent meal I’ve had in my life, I threw in the towel. It was then that I concluded the restaurant’s 90-minute limit was a good thing. There is absolutely no reason anyone needs to stick around for longer than that. Not only would it put Mikiya’s profits in jeopardy, the law of diminishing returns sets in on your own enjoyment for every second you spend in pursuit of “getting your money’s worth” after you’re already full.
And, as we wrapped up the evening sipping milk teas and licking the ice cream we took from the self-serve bar, we saw our friend beaming, her cheeks rosy with satisfaction. But she had yet another surprise for us. She revealed she was a Chubby Club member! So she not only got us the discounted per-person price on our final bill, but also managed to activate a reward that completely covered her share of the dinner.
Having a friend who volunteers to drive you to and from LAX is one thing, but having one who saves you money on the meal meant to pay back that kindness? Priceless.
Mikiya Wagyu Shabu House is located at 3745 Alton Pkwy, Irvine. Phone (949) 875-8002, Open 11:30 a.m.-10 p.m. mikiyashabu.com.
