Toriki, Shinagawa

the famous yakitori shop with the red lantern.

Our first nite in Tokyo....dinner was scheduled at the suburb area in Shinagawa. Since everyone got there on their own at the stipulated time.....JS & Monkey and decided to be adventurous and took the subway with 2 different connections.

JS: "Let's take the shinkansen to Shinagawa."
Monkey: "U gotta be kidding me? that would be less than 3 minutes ride for the kind of money paid.......anyway the shinkansen station is very very far from the yakitori place."

after catching the city metro to the end of the line, we hopped into another rail service and arrived at a tiny stop called Hatanaodai...got off....flipped open our phone and checked bearing...okie right behind KFC.

JS rolled his eyes and said: "How befitting...a yakitori *grilled chicken* near to KFC....this is a chicken town!!!!"
Monkey: "Calm down JS, I am sure there's other things for u to eat."
but I was wrong....

When we arrived...the rest of the gang were ady dunking in appetizers and dousing sake merrily celebrating LIFE :))))

J&J James came out to get us into this lil tuck shop and we were greeted with chef-owner Kunio Aihara holding up his chicken proudly!!!! It ain't no free range bird here. To keep the prices low, chef managed to source good quality young chicken fr his trusted bird farmers. *do u call them bird farmers??*

Appetizer of nato and raw egg yolk with freshly cut japanese leeks. I'm not a fan of nato bcoz of its flavour and texture but the guys said this was good.

One of the famous dish here is the grilled chicken drumstick.

Chef doesn't pre-prepare his meat by skewering them into sticks - oh well most of the time....instead he will just kept on dissecting whole bird right in front of you into parts and lay them onto the electric griller right smack in front of it. Instead of using charcoal griller, his electric version still produce yummylicious chicken. Well that explains why there isn't much smoke inside this tuck shop!!!

Grilled chicken gizzard

There were also some parts grilled and served on its skewer

I have no idea which part of the chicken innards are these :P just slightly salted with sea salt.

We ordered a homemade toufu for Mr. JS :P
It was seriously good, just drizzle with some soy sauce

More innards....I think the intestines or stomach part of the chicken?

More yummy grilled chicken with homemade sauce

my favourite gotta be the chicken skin :D:D:D

House salad was refreshing and crunchy - with slices of chicken as well. Poor JS >.<

so plates after plates of food just kept arriving and we drank 13 bottles of sake :P

God of Eatery aka GOE and Yiks who just landed from Hokkaido....describing the excitement and torturous time they had in their cycling expedition. I think they mistakenly joined the professional expedition, it sounded really tough.

another house speciality of Chef Aihara was this lightly seared on the outside and raw on the inside chicken meat. I've eaten raw chicken sashimi before but this time around, Monkey didn't take the risk for she's about to climb mount Fuji in a few days time!!!

Apparently in Japan, there's more ppl that died from raw chicken due to salmonella than from eating fugu. Shocking statistics hmmm?

I lurve my meat burnt like this!!! yummmsss

Monkey: "JS this is so so so yummy!!!"
JS: "-_-" yesssss I can see that........"

Joanna decided that she's much more kawaii after all the sake!!!! while GOE looked drained from all the days of cycling, all 472km in Hokkaido...LOL...and it was kinda uphill workout due to the mountainous terrain. 

While Chili and Champagne King looked so casual and chillax, prollie ain't enuff of cycling for he cycles to work everyday anyway.

GOE: "I wanna go home and see my baby."

GOE is now a man-tai, and took a year off sabbatical to chill and enjoy life. This is the way to go man. So more cycling adventures coming ur way :))))

Mr. J&J James was planning how to get up to Mount Fuji after all the cycling. I have no idea how did this mean machine do it but HE DID and conquered Mount Fuji a few days after that. Oh the 3 of us did it bcoz of him so he was the man behind our mountain expedition.

I remembered, halfway through the climb, he asked J&J Jelina many many times...."Why are we doing this?"
Monkey >.<" self inflicted torture!!!

Joanna enjoying her yummy finger lickin good chicken wings, while listening to all of their Hokkaido stories. Yea I must admit it was such a lovely dinner in the company of good friends, good adventures stories, great food and extremely smooth sake!!!

Japanese have learnt to work in such a small space. Hence organisation and work flow is truly important. Underneath the chopping board were chilling unit where chef stored all his whole chicken, which he will dissect on his wooden chopping board, before placing them onto the electric grilled next to him, Behind him were pots and pots of chicken stocks boiling for the welcome soup. It was yummzzzz.

After dinner, the guys pushed their luggage outta the tiny space. For they are heading straight to the airport to catch their flight home...so from 8 of us....it's now down to 6 to continue our food adventure in Tokyo.

One pic for remembrance fr the iPhone. Amazing great no fuss yakitoris. If you don't mind the journey out of city to the suburb area this is kinda hole in the wall place. Chef Aihara has put himself on the map....especially when Anthony Bourdain came for a visit and it was also shown in "No Reservations"

and poor JS with nothing to eat, coz everything was served, there's no other grill meat at Toriki apart from chicken. So Monkey brought him to our favourite burger joint - Freshness Burger for his dinner and me more beer and onion rings time. They even have a snacks set menu of beer with chips, onion rings, fried cheese etc. Yums yums

His burger looked really good too.....I was so tempted to take a bite but didn't wanna steal a hungry man's food....for a hungry man is an angry man u know?

Toriki
3-11-13 Hatanodai,
Shinagawa-ku, Tokyo,
Japan.
Tel: 03.3785.8472
Closed: Sundays, Mondays and Public Holidays
from 5pm till midnite

Torimasa Yakitori, Nagasaki

We got our Resort to make the reservation. The mention of Torimasa put smiles on the lovely concierge's face. Shows that this is a good place. She gave us the address and direction to get to this yakitori place. Chef Ota even specifically mentioned we must go to the one eat Nagasaki Train Station. It seems that this train station is like point zero where everything starts from here, every direction starts from here and every pickup starts from here too. So after only 3 days in Nagasaki we kinda pretty much familiar with....Nagasaki Train Station. Bahahahaha.

We've arrived at this street full of eateries, bars and pubs...not to mention Pachinko aka SLOT MACHINES!!! What is it with Japanese and slot machines center??? U find so many of these huge places with hundreds of slot machines and it's fully packed with ppl busy "donating" money to these game machines. -_-

Torimasa was no where to be found. The problem with us and Japan and the language is...we can't read. It isn't like ABC alphabetical where we could read, this is like with strokes and points and characters....eventually everyday we had to compare strokes by strokes, points by points to make sure it's the same character...trust me it takes 500% longer comparing japanese characters than to read French/Italian/Greek/Spanish.

JS eventually found it but we were starring at the food display...
"This isn't yakitori!!!"
JS: "But the characters state this is the place!!!"

Dunno wat strucked us....oh it must be UPSTAIRS!!!!
GAH!!!!!
Chef Ota opened Sumika in Subang Jaya has the same concept....upstairs
-_-"

We made our way upstairs...and finally there's ABC that states TORIMASA!!!
THIS IS THE RIGHT PLACE!!!! BAHAHAHAHAHAHA
to our relief and to the happiness of our hungry tummies

The sight of this griller brought HUGE smiles onto our face :))))
Ya-Ki-To-Ri


The standard offering of cabbage. You add the sauce on top as you wish.
There isn't an english menu. No ENGLISH were spoken here...so please plan and be prepared for a bit :P


I must say the cabbage here is different from what we got in Malaysia. It is already so sweet on its own minus the weird cabbage "smell". Basically it's something that I will eat a lot here bcoz I'm not a fan of cabbage.

a simple appetizer of potato salad was so yummy bcoz there's tuna innit. I guess when you have superior ingredients, u can never go wrong with it.

JS was educating Monkey on japanese characters...
Ok ok ok now let's eat, I'm very hungry. Keep the lesson after our dinner hehehehe

Thankfully there's a cold display with skewered food at the table counter. We get to point whatever we wanted...hahahaha otherwise I don't really know how to order our dinner.

Grilled Pork Belly....
OMG this was really good...the burns was so uniformed and was still sizzling when it was put on our lil "rack"

Papa Bear Seiichi reminded us that we MUST MUST MUST eat squid in Kyushu for it's the best squid in Japan. So we had squid right from north Kyushu, down to West side, and as we traveled to East into the heart of Kyushu, we've been busy stuffing our face with Squids....hahahahaha. True enuff it's really really good beyond description with the fattiness and texture.


Bacon wrapped with a different variety of onion shoots. It looked like chinese cabbage but has the taste of sweet onions. I have no idea wat kind of vege this was.


Bacon wrapped enoki mushrooms. We ordered the standard of wat we usually have in Sumika Subang Jaya to have a comparison in terms of technique, taste and ingredients.

Chef Ota told us Torimasa was his Sensei - Si Fu. So it's like goin back to mecca for me. If Chef Ota is already so good and yummy, this was really superior. It all lies in the charcoal, technique and ingredients.


The interior with bottles of Soju was pretty much identical to Sumika. Those bottles of alcohol were mostly labeled with customers' names.


Char-grilled perpectoral part of a tuna.
This was so juicy and fat and yummy.

Bcoz Pork Belly is so yummy, gotta have more :))))))))

The bomb was this!!!! Chicken Wings!!!

The Chicken wing was flatten to give it more crisp to its skin. U drooling yet?

Sweet Onions was really good too. I do not know how do u even skewer this slice of onion without damaging it.

Grilled onigiri, served with pickled mustard leaves.
Judging from the color, u'll know how crispy and how fragrant this was :)))) Nothing beats the awesomeness of comfort food like this :))))

Japanese leeks was so so sweet

and again bcoz the Pork Belly was so good, I had to have more :P
I know.....there's so much of other things to eat...but lookin at the size of my tummy, I need to be selective...hehehehe

Yakitori is usually eaten with beer/soju/alcohols for japanese after a hard day in the office, before they depart home. It's usually eaten with colleagues in a very fun way and environment :))) Hence there's set menu like "Salary Men" set which comprises a few of chicken yakitoris and beer.

Torimasa Yakitori *2 minutes walk from Nagasaki JR Train Station*
8-2 2F, Daikoku-cho
Nagasaki,
Tel: 095 828 0456
www.torimasa.net