Brandon Y.
Yelp
Robata jin was recommended by the lovely staff at our hostel since we arrived in Beppu rather late. Luckily, they had orders until 10:30 or 11pm. We had to wait a little bit on a Saturday night, but were later seated upstairs in a small Japanese style room with a barrier between us and another rather loud party.
Perusing the menu, everything was in Japanese, but we were able to figure out the specials and menu items. We actually ordered quite a bit of food, as well as drink.
Toriten: Chicken tempura was our favorite. It comes with six chicken tempura and is a bit lighter and crispier than the typical karaage/fried chicken. Pretty sure for the four of us, we ordered 4 plates of this. So worth it.
Sashimi: Unfortunately I forget what kinds of fish we ordered, I think one was saba/mackerel...in any case, it was very fresh, and I really enjoyed the raw fish
Mix salad: quite nice, comes with baby corn, and bomb sesame dressing
Spare ribs: another one of our favorites; tender ribs that we couldn't keep our hands off
Vegetable tempura: a bit less of a proportion than we were expecting but comes with mushroom, squash, tomato, and okra with a green powder for dipping
Yuukyuu: Recommended to order, and had a decent amount of fish with shiso leaf and nori; probably even better than the sashimi we had
They have a great selection of fish as well as shochu and Nihonshu (potato wine and Japanese rice wine), though for the majority of the meal we were set with a big size of beer - we are talking as big as your face, big. It was quite a deal.
If coming here on a weekend during the evening, I would definitely suggest making a reservation. The service was subpar for Japan...the waitress repeatedly had to clarify what we ordered and looked confused when we were trying to speak to her in Japanese. We were also sort of rushed out a bit before midnight, though we didn't really want to move after our feast.
I would still come here again when visiting Beppu though. So yummy. And that toriten and spareribs though...deeeelish