At Bengara, an Ancient Grilling Technique Takes a Modern Turn

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08 Sep 2026

A4 Wagyu Katsu Sandwich at Bengara. Credit: Wonho Frank Lee

At his new Los Angeles restaurant, chef Tyler Burges uses genshiyaki to cook seafood beside binchotan coals and serves soba made by hand each day.

“We thought it was a really unique cooking style that I’ve never really seen before,” says Burges, recalling his first encounter with genshiyaki at Sumi Gekijo Musashi Za, a robatayaki restaurant in Fukuoka, Japan. “It’s really a delicate way that you wouldn’t really think of as grilling, because grilling is such an extreme heat.”

Burges has built his reputation around live-fire cooking at Smoke Door Yokohama and Smoke Door Lake Tahoe. At Bengara, his newest restaurant in the Arts District of downtown Los Angeles, genshiyaki offers him a different way to work with fire.

Genshiyaki roughly translates as “primitive grilling” and refers to a traditional Japanese cooking method. The technique is sometimes traced to fishing communities in Hokkaido and around the seaside city of Atami, where whole fish were pierced with bamboo skewers and positioned upright in sand or ash around a charcoal fire.

Whereas conventional grilling exposes food to intense, direct heat from one side, genshiyaki takes a more restrained approach. “You’re cooking with radiant heat on the outside of it, instead of directly above. Heat rises, so instead of putting something directly above embers or charcoal in this manner, you’re putting it all around, so that radiant heat gently cooks everything, instead of that harsh extreme heat on one side,” says Burges.

At Bengara, Burges uses that restraint to keep the focus on the ingredients. “You don’t really get a really strong charcoal flavor from it. You don’t get a really strong smoky flavor,” he says, adding that the food often needs nothing more than salt. “It’s really a pure cooking method.”

Similar forms of hearth cooking were once practiced throughout Japan.

“Basically every household had a fire in the center of the house that would keep you warm in the winter,” says Burges. The fire was often built in an irori, a sunken hearth used in traditional Japanese homes for heating and cooking. “You would either have a pot of rice above the fire or stew, for example, and then around it you would have protein like fish. The vegetables were usually marinated or just salted, fresh or preserved in some way.”

There is a certain thrill in seeing a modern restaurant embrace an ancient technique, but Bengara’s slow roasting is more than novelty or nostalgia. The process can produce crisp exteriors while keeping the interiors juicy. Head-on tiger prawns retain their natural sweetness without being overwhelmed by smoke.

“You want to gently cook the prawns. You don’t want to boil them really hard. You don’t want to sear them really hard, because otherwise they get dry on the outside,” says Burges. Genshiyaki gives them what he describes as a “really soft and fluffy texture” rather than leaving them “a little bit dry and chewy.”

Miso-marinated cod offers another example of genshiyaki’s advantages. “You can’t grill a piece of miso-marinated cod because it would stick to the grill,” says Burges, explaining why the fish is often baked or broiled instead. With genshiyaki, however, it never touches a grate. “I think that the purest form is cooking it with a genshiyaki, where everything’s kind of dripping off. It’s not sitting in its own juices,” he says. As it cooks, the miso develops “a little bit of that toasted marshmallow crispiness.”

Bengara also uses genshiyaki to prepare kiritampo, an Akita Prefecture specialty made from pounded rice shaped around a skewer like a corn dog. Burges brushes it with red miso and tops it with Santa Barbara uni.

Although genshiyaki is Bengara’s centerpiece, Burges and the Smoke Door team did not want the restaurant to become a catchall for Japanese cooking. Burges says some Los Angeles restaurants try to cover too much ground: “They’re doing sushi and they’re doing yakitori and they’re doing ramen, and there’s not really a clear focus.”

“We decided to kind of go in the other direction, doing it in our own way,” Burges says. That does not mean avoiding raw fish altogether. Bengara serves a Toyosu carpaccio with kumquat gelée and chili coffee oil. “But we don’t branch off and overextend ourselves and try to overreach,” he says. “We have soba on the menu because a guy here is making fresh soba every day.”

Los Angeles has no shortage of ramen and udon, but freshly made soba is much harder to find.

“Fresh hand-cut soba is a very unique thing,” says Burges, who notes that its texture is entirely different from that of dried noodles. Even what is sold as “fresh soba” is “never the same as hand-cut, freshly made” noodles.

And that is what makes Bengara special. For all its modern polish, the restaurant’s most compelling dishes begin with old methods: fish propped beside a fire, rice molded around a skewer, and soba cut by hand. Burges is not recreating the past for show. For him, sometimes the ancient way still works best.

The Chef

Chef Tyler Burges channels California seasonality and Japanese technique into live-fire cooking at Smoke Door and Bengara in Los Angeles.

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About the author

Heather Platt is a Los Angeles-based food and travel writer and journalist with over a decade of experience covering food, restaurants and travel stories for outlets including...

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