Gretchen McKay | (TNS) Pittsburgh Post-Gazette PITTSBURGH — Gathering with family or friends for a backyard cookout is always a good time. But for the person tasked with manning the grill? Maybe not so much. It’s often hot, tends to be smoky and the hosts almost never get to socialize with guests because they’re too busy cooking for everyone.
“And there’s always some guy with dad shorts running around, and char on the food,” jokes self-taught chef Sorcha Murnane, who identifies as non-binary, trans masculine. Murnane’s career was largely focused on fast-casual dining in New York and Atlanta. That was until moving to Pittsburgh in 2023 after hearing a friend “raving” about it.
The mood’s a little more relaxed and interactive at Cobra, where the Ireland native, who uses they/them pronouns, took the reins as executive chef a little over a year ago. Modeled after Asian-style barbecue restaurants in New York and L.A.
, the Pittsburgh restaurant, which co-owners Derek Burnell and Miranda Piso opened just before the start of the pandemic in 2020, offers a sleek, modern approach to one of Japan’s most popular hands-on culinary experiences: yakiniku. Drawn from the Korean barbecue tradition of bulgogi, yakiniku was brought to Japan by Korean immigrants in the 1920s. It translates to “grilled meat” and refers both to the country’s style of barbecue and the tabletop grill on which the bite-sized pieces of marinated or seasoned meat and vegetables are cooked.
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