7 Japanese BBQ & Yakitori Bar

All-you-can-eat sushi and Japanese barbecue are generally found at separate restaurants – the former at places such as Tustin’s Sake 2 Me or Irvine’s Tomikawa, the latter at Westminster’s Shinobu Japanese BBQ – so you’ll rarely find both options under a single roof. Irvine’s new 7 Japanese BBQ & Yakitori Bar (listed on Instagram as 7 Japanese BBQ & Sushi) is one of those rare exceptions: After extensively retrofitting a former Islands location, 7 opened in late December 2024. When we visited in mid-January 2025, it was apparently still sussing out its final form and pricing.

After being seated at a table with a central, wire-topped BBQ grill, guests order everything – pre-sliced raw proteins, sushi, hot kitchen items, and drinks – from an iPad-based menu, and in our experience, servers brought over plates fairly quickly regardless of whether they’re cold or hot. You use tongs to cook raw beef, pork, chicken, lamb, shrimp, and squid yourself while large metal tube vents above tables do their best to suck up smoke; the grills rarely produce visible flames, except when fat drips off the meats, which thankfully aren’t particularly oily.

Expect two major compromises in the 7 experience. First, while sushi, BBQ, and kitchen-prepared Japanese items are all available, you’ll have fewer choices in any category than AYCE places specializing in either sushi or Japanese BBQ. On our visit, the iPad showed only four nigiri options (tuna, masago, shrimp, and eel), plus roughly two dozen rolls with a lot of ingredient overlap. Similarly, there were 11 types of raw meat to barbecue, though “top blade” beef was listed in three ways: “sliced,” “diced,” or as a pre-scored “DNA cut” steak. Around a dozen kitchen items ranged from two beef soups to fried karaage chicken, french fries, and two types of edamame. The karaage we tried was fine.

That’s the other compromise: All the food we tried at 7 was just OK. The sushi was below par by local AYCE sushi standards – not quite Kura-quality in either flavors or texture, regardless of the ingredients. Similarly, 7’s meats were tender but plain-tasting, brought to life largely from a watery miso sauce left on each table. Virtually everything on an included dish of pickled cucumber, radish, kimchi, and sliced onions was more sweet than tart. In other words, 7 is a restaurant to consider if you’re more concerned about quantity than quality.