A little over a week ago, I had an opportunity to join some of my friends for a private dinner with YakitoriGuy. I was invited to this because my friend who organized all this knows how much I’ve been enjoying tasting menus lately (and I’ve been to quite a few together with her), so she figured that I would enjoy this as well.
As you can probably tell from his name, YakitoriGuy specializes in yakitori. Yakitori, or 焼き鳥, translates to “grilled bird”; practically, it is small portions of chicken threaded onto skewers and grilled over charcoal. He sources Jidori chicken for his dinners, which he appropriately names “The YakitoriGuy Experience,” and he builds a “course list” (which, in his case, would be a “skewer list”) using as much of the chicken as possible, even including portions that people who aren’t particularly chicken enthusiasts would not even know existed.
For those who know me for my restaurant recaps and my (sometimes unconventional and unusual) reviews and analyses on different tasting menus and omakase experiences I go to, I want to clarify that this blog post does not count as one of those. Not only is this just not a regular restaurant where you can show up and order off a menu, but even if I tried or wanted to do a detailed breakdown, I don’t remember enough specifics about what part of the chicken each skewer was made from to be able to provide much value in my commentary beyond “it tasted good.”
Overall, the dinner was fantastic, both food-wise and experience-wise. I learned a good amount about yakitori, and YakitoriGuy was very interactive with all of us throughout the dinner, which is what you’d expect from a quality experiential dinner like this. I think the skewers with only chicken were decent, but I really enjoyed the skewers that had both chicken and vegetables. In my personal opinion and for my own culinary preferences, I think chicken on its own has a lower ceiling of deliciousness than other kinds of meat. However, if you’re building combination skewers with chicken and other complementary items, I think that’s where the food really shines. Thus, although I still liked the chicken with simple sauces and garnishes, the ones you’ll see grilled together with large cuts of vegetables were my favorites.
As a side note, YakitoriGuy does serve members of the public sometimes, but he does it in an exclusive and limited pop-up structure, and the dinner I was able to enjoy was a fully private group hand-picked and curated by my friend. If you’re interested in potentially attending one of his pop-ups, he mentioned that the best way to do that would be to check out his website (linked above), register for his newsletter, and follow him on social media for his latest updates.
With that all being said, consider this to be a casual photo diary of my dinner:
