Chicken on a Stick, Y’All? Japanese Yakitori Plants Its Skewers in U.S.

(Bloomberg) -- One of Japan’s most ubiquitous dishes is the chicken-on-a-stick staple, yakitori. Seemingly simple—often seasoned with either salt or tare, a mirin-sweetened soy sauce—these skewered morsels have an appeal that is nearly universal. 

Yet yakitori (yaki means grilled over direct heat, while tori is the Japanese word for chicken) has never found the audience in the United States that sushi and ramen have. And that is about to change.

Several Japanese yakitori restaurants and chains have decided that this year is the ideal time to plant their skewers in American soil. Toritetsu, a Tokyo-based chain with nearly 50 outlets in Japan, just opened its first North American branch in the Mitsuwa Japanese grocery store in Arlington Heights, just outside of Chicago. Tori Jiro, which has more than 60 locations in Japan, Hong Kong, Italy, and the Philippines, has announced plans to open in Boston’s Arsenal Yards development. And Torishiki, one of Tokyo’s leading yakitori restaurants, will debut Torien, an omakase-only, 26-seat outpost on New York’s Lower East Side in September. Dinner there will likely cost $150 per person.

Like sushi and ramen, two other Japanese exports with global appeal, yakitori can inspire fanatical devotion from both diners and chefs. The butchering honors the entire bird and can be as complex as anything a sushi chef does with fish. A chicken wing alone can yield skewers that focus specifically on shoulder meat from the drumette, for instance, or just the skin from the wing tip. Each will demand its own cooking style on the binchotan grill, and each will have a distinct taste, texture, and often, seasoning.

Bernard Radfar was so devoted to Yakitoriya in Los Angeles that he moved to be within walking distance of the restaurant. He likened the atmosphere to the sitcom Cheers: “I’ll show up at 6:30, and sometimes I’m not home until three in the morning. I’m there drinking and talking, and tasting little things, and then friends will come and I’ll have their dinner with them.” He dined there 17 nights in a row at one point and has now written a book about the yakitori made by chef Toshi Sakamaki, called Chicken Genius, which will be released next month by Rare Bird Books.

What is it about yakitori that inspires such devotion? “Yakitori isn’t only about chicken, any more than sushi is raw fish,” writes chef and restaurateur Nobu Matsuhisa, another of Yakitoriya’s devotees, in the foreword to Chicken Genius. Chef Sakamaki, he writes, “expands our idea of what can be done with an ingredient handled in the purest manner.”

Maison Yaki, which opened in Brooklyn, N.Y., in April, expands on the cult of yakitori. Chef Greg Baxtrom takes skewers of not just chicken but also steak, seafood, duck, and vegetables. After grilling, he finishes them with sauces and spices from the French larder: ribeye with bordelaise, say, or chicken breast with Sauce Allemande.

The restaurant’s version of tsukune, the poultry meatball that’s a standard on every izakaya’s roster of yakitori dishes, is made of duck. The dish is typically served with a dish of tare for dipping, usually with a raw egg yolk in the middle, to swirled in for added richness. Baxtrom has replaced the yolk with dollop of orange for a delicious riff on duck a l’orange.

The atmosphere is casual—cocktails and skewers are all under $10 each, there’s a petanque court in the back garden, and David Bowie on the sound system. But Baxtrom’s love of yakitori is honestly earned. He lived for a time next door to Torishin, New York’s venerable yakitori spot, and knew it as a smoky hangout where chefs could sit quietly and munch on skewers of esoteric cuts like the “knee gristle,” tail, oyster (a rich tender lobe of meat from where the thigh meets the backbone), and skin from the neck, belly or wing, each with its own appeal.

Around the time Baxtrom was eating at Torishin, Canadian chef Matt Abergel was cooking at Masa, chef Masayoshi Takayama’s sushi hideaway where dinner costs $595 per person. Abergel’s passion for yakitori was stoked over countless late-night meals of yakitori with the chef and Sunday evenings at Yakitori Totto with his now-partner Lindsay Jang, who worked at Nobu. Eventually, Abergel left Masa to hone his yakitori skills at Torishin.

Afterward, he alighted to Hong Kong where he and Jang opened Yardbird Hong Kong. There, the skewers range from the easy, like chicken thigh with tare and negi, to the advanced, like thyroid with sake and garlic. When Baxtrom began casting about to bone up on his yakitori technique, his friends kept telling him to go there, not Japan. “I was like, why would I go to Hong Kong to learn from a Canadian about yakitori?” he says. “When it hit something like 30 people that I knew who said, ‘Go. See what he’s doing,’ I just did it. And it was awesome.”

The spirit of Yardbird Hong Kong—from its obsessively intricate butchery to the similarly obsessive attention paid to interior and graphic design, staff training, and partnerships with brands such as Vans and Carhartt—is documented in its cookbook, Chicken and Charcoal: Yakitori, Yardbird, Hong Kong. Billed as the first comprehensive book about yakitori to be published in English, it won one of this year’s James Beard Foundation book awards.

The duo is planning to open an outpost of the restaurant in downtown Los Angeles this year. Another restaurant group holds the rights to the name Yardbird, however, so the new venture will debut under a different name. But Abergel still finds all the anticipation, hype, and analysis amusing. “The thing about yakitori is that at the end of the day, it’s just chicken on a stick cooked over charcoal.” 

To contact the editor responsible for this story: James Gaddy at jgaddy@bloomberg.net

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