26/7 Claire

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Originally uploaded by blenkers

For our last night in Kyoto we popped out to a local restaurant for Yakatori and other grilled delights. Yakatori are items grilled on skewers and you buy each in a set of 3. This allows you to try many things and to share in the same way you do in a tapas style restaurant I guess. This place was, again, traditional in it’s style with shoes off at the door and a few low tables with cushions for sitting on. There was also a bar that you could sit at facing the food cooking area, not a high bar though… you still sit at floor level with a gap below for your legs to dangle. We sat at this bar directly in front of the owner/chef guy so we could see what was going on. The place was very, shall we say, “rustic” and was, as we later described, “lifting” but the food was really delicious. We ate chicken and spring onion, pork, peppers, Japanese mushroom wrapped in bacon and finally mini eggs (perhaps quail we couldn’t decide) that were repeatedly dipped in some kind of sauce before being replaced on the griddle yet still managed to get to us with slightly soft yolks. I think the flavour was enhanced by the years worth of burned on food on the griddle and probably wouldn’t have been half as good if there had been daily scrubbing or disinfecting of the cookware. I may revert to this technique on my BBQ as it’s clearly done us no harm.