Yokayoka

There is a Japanese restaurant on Sukhumvit soi 16 called Yokayoka.  With very good but also very unique Japanese food that you do not get anywhere else in Bangkok (that I know of).  The owner is a very young Japanese man who is very helpful and obliging.  Since the menu offered a lot of interesting things, we did not know what to order, so we asked the owner to decide for us. Here were his recommendations.  

The first dish was deep fried chicken with vinegar.  We never had this dish before.  At first the chicken did not look very appetizing, but once we tasted the chicken, it was actually very good.  The chicken was tender inside and slightly crunchy on the outside and the vinegar sauce was a pleasant surprise.  

The next dish was a long finger shell fish, with the consistency of abalone.  It was grilled over the fire and we simply had to spray fresh lemon juice onto the shell fish.  They were very fresh and had the right saltiness from the sea.  

The next dish to come out was a very strange and unique dish.  It is called octopus dim-sum.  It did not look like dim-sum but it actually looked like snow balls.  But it was an eye trick.  It was shredded octopus and put back together again by shaping it into a ball.  What was holding the octopus ball together was the filling of an egg custard with bite size octopus mixed in.  It was not my favourite dish.  It was bland, but was ok if you dipped it into the soy sauce.

The next dish was a selection of sashimi by the manager.  You can always judge a good Japanese restaurant by its fresh sashimi.  The selection was very fresh and tasty.  Nothing new or exciting, but a good selection non-the-less.

     

We ended the dinner with squid tempura.  The tempura was fried very nicely and it was not too oily.  The squid was fresh so it was not too chewy.  

Yokayoka is very popular with the Japanese community.  The first time we went to Yokayoka, the Japanese manager asked us how we found out about his restaurant because he never advertised in english.  We are lucky that we had a Japanese friend who knew about this great restaurant or we would have never experienced such unique and tasty Japanese food.  One very nice aspect of the restaurant is the friendliness of the manager.