Yakitori Totto Review - The Ultimate Chicken Experience

 

Nestled atop an intimidating, artistically lit set of stairs just off 55th street in New York City is a temple to our most humble,versatile, and valuable food source - Gallus Domesticus .  The restaurant is Yakitori Totto , and the object of worship is Chicken, aka Yardbird.    Yakitori is Japanese for "grilled bird" (yaki = grilled & tori = bird), a largely unknown but wonderful facet of the world of barbecue and grilled foods.   Small bits of chicken are placed on skewers and grilled over Japanese charcoal (bincho-tan) and served with only salt for a garnish.  Simplicity governs the world of yakitori and every part of the the bird is honored.  A traditional yakitori menu will include liver, gizzard, heart, knee, skin or any other tasty morsel that can be stuck on a bamboo skewer.  After muddling through a mediocre barbecue lunch earlier that day in Times Square, I considered myself celestially blessed as I pulled up my chair directly in front of the grill at Yakitori Totto and opened my menu to consider the universe of options laid before me.

Michael Ruhlman is probably responsible for introducing me to Yakitori with his blog post Best Chicken.Ever.  I remember searching the Atlanta area in March of last year for a yakitori restaurant to try and finding only one in a not-so-convenient location.  I can safely say that Michael was nowhere in my mind that recent day in NYC.  All I could focus on was forgetting my poor lunch with something world class -  something unusual.  When I returned to my room after lunch, I fired up the laptop and entered the following terms in Google, "Best Yakitori NYC".  The consensus from Google was immediate.  Yakitori Totto - 55th street.  Hallelujah.  The best yakitori in the city was only 6 blocks away.  I lamented my full belly.  The urge to purge surfaced briefly but I fought it off.  I just needed to kill a few hours, so I started reading through the reader reviews.  I quickly learned that Totto had a reputation for being busy, with some people waiting up to 90 minutes for a seat.   Suddenly, the Fear gripped me and I knew I had to get out of my little hotel room and walk or I was gonna go full-on Kurtz.

I spent a few hours mingling around with the touristas and bought the requisite "I Heart NY" t-shirts for my two daughters.  I killed time in the mega Toys-R-Us and the uber-Virgin Record megalopolis.  It was getting dark and I checked my watch.  Chow time.

One of the great things about Yakitori Totto is its size.  It's small.  I'm just guessing, but the place probably seats only around 50 people.  Once you reach the top of the stairs and pull a 180 degree turn, you are flanked on the right side by the open kitchen and the best seats in the house.  Past the grill-side seating, the restaurant opens up into the main dining room.  The decor of the building is Japanese via Danish Ikea.  I actually have two of the lights in my home that they use in the restaurant.  The color palate of dark browns, creams, and low, artsy lighting sets a perfect ambiance.  I pulled up a stool across from the kitchen to await my seat.  For the first time in my life I felt like I could have been participating in an episode of No Reservations.  I didn't know it at the time, but Ruhlman had dined at Totto just 24 hours prior to my arrival.  I learned later that evening after a little more Googling that Thomas Keller, Eric Ripert, Marco White and many other culinary heavy hitters are big fans of this restaurant.  The rarefied air of Totto filled my lungs, and I thanked the food gods for tossing me a bone.

While waiting for my seat, I tried to get a feel for the rhythm of the line.  Totto's line isn't really a line in the classical brigade sense.  There's only two stations - grill and skewer-making.  Of the four guys I could see on the line, only one was cooking.  There were three other guys working on the line, but their primary duties seemed to be making skewers to be cooked on the yakitori grill and plating skewers as they came off the grill.  It seemed remarkable to me that such a popular and busy restaurant was powered off a grill one quarter the size of the one on my porch.  It's like powering a Harley with a moped motor.  After getting a feel for the kitchen, I started paying attention to the wait staff.  All of the waitresses were very friendly, attentive, efficient, and they all dressed very cool.  The front of the house and the back of the house seemed to be working in concert.  What I really loved about Totto was that they had chosen their niche, picked a manageable-sized space, and were executing on it well.  That is the sort of thing that really excites me when it comes to food.

So, enough with the chatter right?  Let's make with the Food Porn.

 Course One - Chicken Livers.  Perfection.  Cooked just long enough to warm them through and get the outer layer of the liver to snap like a Coney Island Hot Dog when you bite into it, releasing ooey-gooey delicious liver into your mouth.  I should have ordered four more of these immediately.

 Course 2 - Chicken Thighs with Green Scallion.  Fantastic.  Could have used some liver. 

 Course 3 - Chicken Meatball with Quail Egg.  I'm not exactly sure what's going on in this dish, but it's pretty magical.  The inside of the "meatball" appears to be a farce of chicken bound up in skin (maybe?).  The quail egg was a wonderful touch. 

  Course 4- Prawn.  Probably the least impressive of the lot.  Good but not great.

 Course 5 - Chicken Skin.  This should have been a killer stick, but it was only kinda great.  Underneath that delicous looking crust lurked some gummy chicken skin.  This was also the first course that wasn't salted correctly.

At this point, I order the next four courses - beef, gizzard, chicken heart, and knee.  The 3 Sapporo's and the first five courses had worked their magic on me and I no longer wished to be a blogger.  I just wanted to eat.  So, you'll have to excuse the lack of photographic evidence and trust me when I tell you that the gizzards and heart nearly equaled the liver course.  The knee was really good.  Crunchy.  Unexpected.  The beef was lacking, but that should be no surprise.  When you go to a restaurant specializing in chicken, you should stay away from the alternatives.

After finishing up my meal, I headed back to the hotel to find an email awaiting me from my Hyperweb buddy Carol who runs French Laundry at Home.  She was envious that I was getting to eat the best Japanese food in NYC.  This was an interesting role reversal for me because I'm in a constant state of envy when I read her blog and the dishes she manages to create for herself and her friends.  I went to bed that night thinking that NYC  really might be the greatest city in the world.  I know it gave me one of the best meals of my life.