Nanbantei Yakitori

Funny how all of a sudden I realize that there are Japanese Yakitori restaurants every where. When I was in school, I would always skive around Far East Plaza, a restaurant I have walked by countless times but never walked in, and a dear friend of the blog and in real life, Pampadam brought me and Jelly (my wife's new nickname, she thought of this one herself, really.) to this new old place to try.

Now, this is a small restaurant. So quality is assumed. Check. Service was courteously rude. So restaurant is popular. Check. Menu is unreadable in a good way. So a surprise is going to occur. Check. The great thing about taking Pampadam any where is that she comes prepared. She took out a list of things that she was told to order by her friends and hot damn, her friends were right.

Grilled ball of chicken with quail egg was lovely. (Jelly gulped one whole egg down raw. Nice!) Grilled Mackerel was the only disappointing thing because it tasted like most places. The grilled lamb chop was succulent and delicious, and I don't really like lamb but this was void of all the grin of the lamb after taste. The grilled asparagus wrapped with bacon was as if you were eating meat, and meat alone. One thing that I didn't take the picture of was the grilled rice ball, that was the best one I have had yet.

I ordered many other things for the 3 of us but everything was else is similar to what most yakitori restaurants might have. The dishes that I have were what I thought to be the most outstanding.

The price was reasonable. But there is just something about having fresh and perfect ingredients in the hands of a master that knows how to grill under the most perfect conditions that drives me off the wall. Maybe its a primal instinct where it is encoded in our DNA that we enjoy grilling food, like back in the caves where humans first discovered fire. But be it as it may, a hot grill, fresh ingredients, even in the worst environment, would taste heavenly.