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There are not a lot of good places to have a classic steakhouse experience in Oakland – with a stylish and luxurious atmosphere, sizzle and smoke of a flaming grill, true reverence for meat. (There will be fewer still at the end of the year, when the Rockridge District’s Wood Tavern shuts down.)
Twinflame, a Japanese-Korean robata grill near Mosswood Park, aims to fill that void in many ways save for one key difference – there’s no steak
Or rather, no big honkin’ steak of the kind you might toss a cartoon dog or slap on a black eye. The specialty here is “hamburg steak,” diced-up American wagyu beef that’s grilled over binchotan charcoal. Twinflame is calling itself the first to do it in the Bay Area
Hamburg-steak patties are hot right now in Japan. A staffer at Twinflame says the concept was inspired by restaurants like Hikiniku to Come, a Japanese-based chain with locations so popular they’re reportedly impossible to book. “It’s a big-time social-media restaurant,” explains an online reviewer
Set on the ground floor of an apartment building, Twinflame has a modern, almost cavernous appearance, with industrial ceilings towering over two robata grills with vacuum hoods like NASA rocket nozzles (supposedly, the “twins”). The restaurant opened early in July and welcomes diners for limited walk-in seating and for reservations, which roll out two weeks in advance. There will probably be a line – try bringing a lawn chair, as one person did on a recent visit
The kitchen offers a single main dish. It is three patties of hamburger steak, grilled and served with Koshihikari rice, a vegetable-augmented miso soup and poached egg ($35). Seasonings that come with it include dried-bonito tamari, marinated shiitake mushrooms, green chiles in olive oil, furikake and a potent lemon-rind paste that might have you doing the crying-pucker face from that “Simpsons” lemon-tree episode
Diners can order three side dishes. Gamja jeon are crispy potato pancakes served with truffle aioli and tamari-marinated onions, like Korean hash browns, and are quite crunchable ($10). Doobu kimchi is a fried block of organic tofu with sauteed kimchi and kimchi puree ($13), and gim-mari is a “japchae-wrapped fried nori roll served with tteokbokki dipping sauce” ($11). Yes, everything is fried, and the nori rolls came out first in our accounting – chewy, crispy, hot and sweet
For dessert, there is matcha ice cream, and to drink at the main dining table or a removed bar area, there are beer ($8) and wine, sake by the glass or bottle. There are also whiskey highballs or neat pours with Japanese and Korean spirits, such as Suntory Toki on the low end ($13) and Akkeshi Shoman Shosetsu for the baller crowd ($39)
There’s a voyeuristic element to Twinflame that’s not unlike Benihana. You get to watch the black-clad cooks shape each patty in their palms, slap it on a grill whose flames lick up to eyebrow-singeing height and then set them aside on a warming rack. A server explained that you’re supposed to eat them in a certain way. First, enjoy one plain, to taste the premium beef; trick up the second one with the toppings; finally, dip the third into the runny egg
We mixed and matched for all three, totally destroying their system, and were not disappointed. The patties are meltingly tender with juices concentrated in the center, and plump like lion’s-head meatballs. Eating them is less like scarfing a burger than eating soft, ground meat over rice
For picky Americans, it might be something familiar yet still tasty, an approachable entry into a Japanese food trend. It might not be a true steakhouse, but one thing remains the same — don’t ask for any ketchup
Details: Open 5 p.m.-9 p.m. Wednesdays-Thursdays, 5 p.m.-10 p.m. Fridays-Saturdays and 5 p.m.-9 p.m. Sundays at 230 W. MacArthur Blvd., Oakland; twinflamerobata.com
