Prahran Market’s Yakitori Pop-Up Was Only Meant To Last a Month. Now It’s a Permanent Fixture

Prahran Market has been a reliable place to buy fresh produce since it opened in 1864. But in recent years, the historic market has shifted its focus to attract a younger crowd, with classic businesses such as the American Doughnut Kitchen and G McBean Family Butcher opening new stores with modern fit-outs.

Now, Keng-Hao “Kenny” Chiu (formerly of Benchwarmer and Chiaki) has brought a new element of cool to the market with his yakitori stand Matsuyama, named for the capital of Japan’s Ehime Prefecture. The chef cooks over ogatan charcoal, which “feels like it’s more street-style” than the more common binchotan, he tells Broadsheet.

He focuses on affordable skewers priced between $6 and $8. The yakitori includes chicken thigh, tenderloin, wingettes, skin, heart and liver. All but the skin and thigh – which are seasoned with pepper salt or yuzu and fermented chilli, respectively – are coated with Chiu’s tare, a sauce that took him five years to perfect and is enriched with broth made from leftover chicken bones.

“For the yakitori, I don’t want to go too out of the box because that’s a tradition,” Chiu says. But the kushimono (a catch-all term for skewered foods) is where he gets creative and plays with the flavours he grew up around. “I’m Taiwanese, I don’t want to fake that I’m Japanese. My sensei back in Taiwan told me there’re two types of chefs. One creates new flavours, and one passes down old flavours,” Chiu says. “Yakitori is such a traditional thing to do and I want to pass down that idea. But with other skewers, I can fuck around.”

For the pork belly skewer, he braises the meat as if making Hangzhou dish dong po rou before skewering and grilling it. The kangaroo sees the thinly sliced meat weaved onto the skewer to reduce gaminess, before it’s slathered with Lao Gan Ma, spring onion, garlic and ginger.

Chiu’s is the latest in a series of yakitori pop-ups run by low-key Melbourne chefs, including Nico Bassand, who runs the Ember by Nico pop-up in the Up Climbing bouldering gym car park, and Charles Duan, who is behind the 20-course Roku Omakase at Kura, and sometimes helps out at Chiu’s Prahran Market stand.

The stand was only meant to be a month-long pop-up, but the stall took off thanks to Chinese social media app Rednote. The hype has sustained, and the Matsuyama stand will stay open until June, when Chiu is set to open a permanent restaurant at the market. A place, he says, that will have local craft beers, counter seating and a soundtrack of blues, funk, and city pop.

Until then, he’s also planning to bring a Matsuyama pop-up to Fitzroy’s Near & Far from Thursday March 13 to Sunday April 13, which will run concurrently with the Prahran Market stand. There he’ll add to the yakitori line-up with collagen, tail and spleen skewers on the menu.

Matsuyama
Prahran Market
163 Commercial Road, South Yarra
No phone

Hours:
Tue, Thu & Sat 10am–4pm
Fri 10am–7.30pm
Sun 10am–2pm

@matsuyama_melbourne