Yamato Japanese Restaurant Review

We dined at Yamato on Wednesday, June 5th, 2024.

Yamato Japanese Restaurant in Yorkville, Toronto, has been a staple of the area since 1983, making it one of the oldest teppanyaki-style restaurants in Canada. The restaurant’s commitment to authenticity and the engaging dining experience it offers are key factors that make it special and a long-lasting stalwart of Toronto’s dining scene.

We bypassed the authentic sushi dining experience and sat at a teppanyaki table. For those who don’t know, teppanyaki is a style of Japanese cuisine that uses an iron griddle to cook food in front of the customers.

From the menu, we chose the “Tori,” which was tender boneless chicken dark meat glazed with teriyaki sauce, and the “Daimyo,” which included prime ribeye steak, scallops, and Caribbean lobster meat. Our young chef prepared the food in front of us using entertaining elements such as slicing, dicing, and setting the food on fire. Our chef also incorporated comedic elements that made us laugh. We sipped on our warm sake and ate our salad and very tasty soup while we watched and waited for our food choices to finish cooking.

The freshly prepared food was excellent, perfectly blending the savory, sweet, and umami flavors that make this type of Japanese cuisine so unique.

This was my second time at Yamato in twenty years, and they were as good as I remembered. The teppanyaki experience at Yamato is great for special occasions and groups of friends or family, or if you and your significant other feel like splurging.