With Dawg in Seattle and Ricky tied up with work at the office, I got to play the role of surrogate husband to Chye and Kat for dinner last night. I first met up with Chye at Gama and we polished off a pitcher of watermelon soju and some complimentary pear sake while waiting for Kat to show up and decide where we were going to go for dinner. I felt like trying some place new but we couldn’t think of anything in the area. Kat had been telling me for months that I would love Yakitori Totto, but that was way over on the west side so we decided to check out its sister restaurant Yakitori Torys up in midtown east.

For the uninitiated, yakitori is basically the Japanese answer to kabobs, grilled skewered morsels of meat or veggies. While most yakitori joints these days will grill up everything from garlic to lamb, traditional yakitori focuses on chicken, and Torys definitely gave the poultry top billing. They’re particularly known for unusual chicken offerings like grilled breast bone, neck and even “soft knee bones”. Unfortunately we got there after 9p, and in keeping with what I had heard, all those wacky avian parts which I would have loved to try were all sold out by then. Nevertheless, I was still in for quite a treat, and there was still one peculiar menu item which I could still order- “chicken sashimi”!

Ok, as you can see from the picture it’s not completely raw, but still, you can tell it was hardly touched by heat. What you can’t see is that it was goddamn delicious! It was drizzled with toasted sesame oil and you can see the little mound of salt it was served with. I flecked some salt on a delicate slice, dabbed up a bit of extra sesame oil and tasted it. Wow. If you hadn’t told me it was chicken, I would have guessed it was fish. It was almost identical in flavor and texture to a dish that Sam sometimes makes for me at Hajime- spanish mackerel dunked into hot water for a few seconds, kind of like a quick shabu-shabu. Delicate while still having a substantial mouth-feel, the salt and sesame oil adding just a touch of added interest. Man it was good. And no, I didn’t get salmonella.

Other things we had were chicken wings, chicken hearts, chicken “meatballs”, crispy chicken skin, flank steak pieces, kobe beef tongue, shisito peppers, a terrific salad featuring tiny slivers of fried fish, flecks of mozzarela and an almost-raw egg yolk. Also, a tiny little dish of raw octopus bits in a potent wasabi sauce. All were superb, but after all that, I still just had to finish the meal by ordering one more plate of the chicken sashimi. As I ordered it I thought to myself, but in Dave Chappelle’s voice, “I don’t eat chicken because I’m black, I eat it because it’s goddamn delicious!”.