This Hot Pot Restaurant Serves All-You-Can-Eat Wagyu Beef

The Midnight Diners is a regular collaboration between KQED food editor Luke Tsai and graphic novelist Thien Pham. Follow them each week as they explore the hot pot restaurants, taco carts and 24-hour casino buffets that make up the Bay Area’s after-hours dining scene.

I’m old enough to remember how Americans used to talk about wagyu beef like it was the most rarefied foodstuff in the world — the manna of the gods butchered from some miniscule number of Japanese cattle who’d spent their entire lives being pampered with massages and beer. But at some point in the past decade, wagyu (and pseudo-wagyu) became the number one signifier of bourgeois dining aspirations, to the point that we now have dumpling houses and fast-casual burger joints that churn through hundreds of pounds of the stuff each day.

I’ve mostly been agnostic on the trend — but not so much so that I was immune to the inherent appeal of an (all caps) ALL-YOU-CAN-EAT WAGYU BEEF HOT POT restaurant, especially one that stays open until 11 o’clock at night.

Which is how we found ourselves at Mikiya Wagyu Shabu House at 9:30 on a recent Friday, having had the foresight to put ourselves on Yelp’s remote online waiting list about two and a half hours before we arrived. (Apparently, this is how things are after the hype has already died down a bit. According to our server, four-hour wait times were routine just a few months ago.)

For now, the Santa Clara shop is the only Bay Area outpost for a conglomerate of assorted high-end wagyu beef restaurants, with locations in Las Vegas, Honolulu and all over Southern California, each new dining concept swankier than the last.

And Mikiya is pretty swanky, starting with the massive, theatrically lit display case full of imported A5 Japanese wagyu beef roasts that greeted us at the front entrance. Inside, the overall aesthetic is something akin to a bustling cyberpunk night market: bright neon signs, moody red backlighting and vaguely pagoda-like design features. The dining room was packed with groups of youngish, professional-looking types, and, for what it’s worth, I don’t know if I saw a non-Asian person the entire time.

Speaking as an Asian: We do know our way around a buffet. Even before the first tray of extravagantly marbled wagyu hits the table, you can tell that Mikiya is the kind of high-class Asian buffet that’s so ubiquitous in cities like Singapore and Taipei. The self-serve condiment, noodle and vegetable stations are immaculate — piles of chrysanthemum greens and pristine, unblemished Napa cabbage leaves refilled with such unflagging consistency that they never seemed to diminish. There’s an entire fridge full of pasteurized eggs so you can use the raw yolk as a “sauce” to pair with the sukiyaki broth. There’s a hot cauldron of saucy minced wagyu for you to ladle over rice — as many mini beef donburi as you have stomach space to eat. Cold appetizers like spicy clams and wasabi-spiked raw octopus were so tasty, I would have happily ordered them as a stand-alone at a nice, non-buffet restaurant.

A host of other fun touches feel similarly extravagant — the all-you-can-drink Assam milk tea dispenser, the freezer full of mini-cartons of Häagen-Dazs (i.e. the Rolls Royce of buffet ice cream).

All this, and we haven’t even gotten to the beef! Everything except alcohol is included with the price of admission, but deciding on which specific tier of all-you-can-eat hot pot experience you want can still be confusing, as there are “silver,” “gold” and “diamond” options that vary in price from $55 to $98 in person, and mostly differ in terms of the grade of wagyu offered and a few other super-premium items.

Trust me when I say that the silver tier is already plenty premium. You start the meal by choosing two soup bases for the split pot, and we opted for the most classic options: the slightly sweet, soy sauce–based sukiyaki broth (my favorite) and a clear shabu shabu broth — the most wholesome choice for hot pot eaters whose favorite part of the meal is drinking the soup at the end.

Then comes the parade of meats. Tray after tray of wagyu brisket, shoulder and ribeye sliced nearly paper-thin for you to dip into the hot broth for just a few seconds, then into your sauce of choice: just raw egg yolk for richness if you want to eat it sukiyaki style, or maybe a nutty sesame dressing or a bracing ponzu spiked with garlic and chilies.

Of course, the hallmark of high-quality wagyu beef is its gorgeously fatty white marbling, which is the source of the meat’s rich flavor as well as its tenderness: The fat melts at a much lower temperature than most American beef fat, so you barely need to chew it. At the $55 tier, we were eating Australian wagyu beef, which was less sumptuously marbled than the higher-grade A5 Japanese wagyu available at the other price points, and already, each slice was unspeakably soft and buttery. (I would have argued that the extra marbling of the A5 wouldn’t make much difference at all when eaten in hot pot, but then we received one tray of it by accident — and oh, it did.)

The meal also came with an equally luxurious tray of raw seafood to cook in the hot pot broth (scallops! crab legs! abalone!) and our choice of special stand-alone items — a wagyu marrow bone and seared-wagyu nigiri, both delicious but somewhat superfluous given the amount of beef we were already consuming.

There is a slightly grating tech-y aspect to Mikiya, from the NFT-based memberships (?!) to the unfailingly cheerful AI bot that responds to literally every single Yelp review. But once we sat down for our meal in person, the servers were all so friendly and attentive, and the whole dining experience was seamless and comfortable. Though I don’t know if I’m a full-on wagyu convert yet, I saw that Mikiya also sells an annual (non-NFT) membership that offers discounted rates for $28 a year. And I really, really thought about it. Honestly, I’m still thinking about it.

Mikiya Wagyu Shabu House is open Monday–Thursday 11:30 a.m.–10 p.m., Friday and Saturday 11 a.m.–11 p.m. and Sunday 11 a.m.–10 p.m. at 3590 Homestead Rd. in Santa Clara.