A note on the words: yakiniku means grilling your own meat over a burner set into the table, and yakitori means chicken grilled on skewers by the cook and brought to you ready to eat. Yuba is the delicate skin that forms on the surface of heated soy milk, lifted off and used as a wrapper. Chawanmushi is a savory egg custard steamed in a cup, and soboro is meat minced fine and simmered in seasoning. Ume is Japanese plum, salted and sour, and shiso is the fragrant perilla leaf. Tsukune is minced chicken shaped into a patty or ball, and satsuma-age is a fried cake of ground fish. Abura soba is a bowl of noodles served without soup, dressed instead in fat and seasoning and mixed at the table — mazesoba is another name for that style. Tori paitan is chicken broth boiled hard until it turns white and creamy. Nomihodai, translated here as all-you-can-drink, is a fixed-price arrangement that includes unlimited drinks for a set stretch of time.
Chicken Yakiniku Kakoi on Tabelog (English) — opening hours, payment details and the Japanese address are kept up to date there, not here.
Right then, this is Hangover Meshi. This time I booked “Chicken Yakiniku Kakoi” in Nogizaka, a place for grilled chicken. Specialists in chicken yakiniku do exist out there somewhere, I am sure, but it still strikes me as a fairly unusual format. I have a feeling there was no all-you-can-drink option originally, but when I looked again after a while there was a course with all-you-can-drink attached. That feels a good deal easier to use! So off I went to see what it was like this time!
The place is right next door to the National Art Center, Tokyo.
Seasonal Kakoi Course, 10 dishes [with 2 hours of all-you-can-drink] — 10,000 yen
New Year party plan: Seasonal Kakoi Course [with 3 hours of all-you-can-drink] — 12,000 yen
So there is even a three-hour version of the 10-dish course with drinks included!
This time I went with the 10,000-yen course: 10 dishes and two hours of all-you-can-drink.
I asked a staff member so I could order drinks right away, and was told it is done by QR code.
So I scanned the QR code, then checked back to say that I could not find the all-you-can-drink menu on it.
Apparently the system was not working too well, so the style became: order the items listed under all-you-can-drink from the regular drink menu, ha. The running total keeps climbing, but they told me they would adjust it at the end!
You have to be careful not to order an expensive drink by mistake, which adds a certain tension, ha.
Eel and steamed chicken rolled up in yuba.
It is the first plate to arrive, and it is more substantial than I expected, and seriously delicious.
Eel sauce goes with anything, is what this tells us, I suppose. ^^
Chawanmushi with plenty of soboro in it. Well, it is chawanmushi.
A few ginkgo nuts perched on top, and it is delicious.
Ume-and-shiso breast, the kind you sear on the outside and then roll up to eat.
It is chicken, so you have to cook it properly, we were saying — but the burner runs very hot, and if you let your attention wander it looks ready to scorch, haha.
Still, this much heat is reassuring in its own way. ^^
And here is the Kakoi box.
Grilled chicken packed neatly into a box, the thing this place is known for.
Wing flats, drumettes, thigh, kashiwa, gizzard, and for vegetables carrot, eggplant, shishito peppers, kabocha squash and so on.
For now, grilling while keeping an eye on that strong heat (in fact the heat may have been adjustable, but I went ahead without worrying about it ^^)
House-made satsuma-age turned up in the second half of the grilling.
Chicken abura soba to close. Mazesoba style!
Noodles with a springy bite that pick up the chicken fat nicely — delicious.
Good. Incidentally, this is for two. Share nicely between you, is the idea.
Piping hot soup!
Seasonal strawberry ice cream.
Chicken yakiniku — it is an interesting concept. It is all chicken, but having a range of cuts is fun. The thing is, this is the grill-it-yourself style. Grilling chicken is really quite hard, is it not, and when an amateur does it you tend to err toward overcooking. I came away with the regret that I had cooked it rather too much. In the sense that yakitori is grilled to perfection for you and then served, might that not be the better bet?!
Chicken Yakiniku Kakoi (Chicken dishes / Nogizaka Station, Roppongi Station, Aoyama-itchome Station)
Tabelog dinner rating ★★★☆☆ 3.4
I ate here and paid for it myself. Nothing on this site is a comped meal.
One more for the road?
