Japan
Yakitori
Chicken on bamboo skewers, charcoal-grilled over Bincho-tan, glazed with tare or salted plain — Japanese izakaya's most disciplined dish.
Whole bird, nothing wasted.
Western chicken cookery throws away most of the bird — the cartilage, the tail, the back skin, the gizzards, the heart. A real yakitori counter uses all of it. *Negima* (thigh and leek) is the export hit, but the deep menu runs through *bonjiri* (tail), *nankotsu* (knee cartilage), *kawa* (skin), *seseri* (neck), *hatsu* (heart), *reba* (liver), *zuri* (gizzard). A skilled yakitori chef will spend ten years perfecting twelve cuts.
4 · Plate
Japan
Yakitori
Chicken on bamboo skewers, charcoal-grilled over Bincho-tan, glazed with tare or salted plain — Japanese izakaya's most disciplined dish.
The dish that defines the izakaya (Japanese pub) experience. Yakitori literally means “grilled bird” — the form is old, but the modern restaurant tradition crystallised in postwar Tokyo when ration-era chefs took the whole-bird approach (rather than premium cuts) and built menus around the cuts most other cuisines discard.
Bincho-tan — Japanese white charcoal — is the heat source that defines high-end yakitori. The wood burns at higher temperatures than ordinary charcoal, with less smoke and longer life, and gives the meat a clean char rather than a sooty one. A yakitori counter without bincho-tan can still be good; one with it has a different floor.
Tare or shio, not both.
*Tare* is the sweet soy-mirin-sake glaze, brushed on in the last minute, glossing the meat. *Shio* is plain salt. Most cuts are best in one of the two but not the other — chicken breast is *shio*, thigh is *tare*, skin is *shio*, gizzard is *tare*. A counter chef will tell you which to order; if you ask for tare on a *sasami* (chicken tenderloin) they will frown.