Yakitori Lunch Course - Koshiji

$14.50 + Tax

According to Forbes magazine, 75% of U.S. adults own a grill or a smoker.  Now that makes me one of the minority since I don't own either. I don't want to own a grill when I live in a packed apartment complex because I don't like being gassed by my neighbors' grills in their balconies that are so close to me, and I therefore will absolutely not have a grill in my tiny balcony.  Being grill-less doesn't mean I don't love BBQ food.  I love it so much that I have BBQ several times a month.  Today, I had BBQ for lunch at a Japanese Yakitori restaurant.  This restaurant offers a lunch course that includes a bowl of steamed white rice, a bowl of miso soup, side salad, pickles, and a plate of char-grill-to-order 6 skewers: bacon wrapped green beans, chicken breast, chicken meatballs, steak, eggplant, and chicken wing.  That was a lot of food for me so I brought back half of the skewer plate for dinner.  

I love Japanese Yakitori (grilled skewers) because there is always the Japanese chef manning the hot smoky grill without me sweating and stressing over the doneness of the BBQ. This place has pretty decent tasting food, even though this time, my steak skewer is a bit too tough.  I guess it's probably because the kitchen staff at the back had cut the steak against the wrong grain.  The steak tasted good, just it was too tough.  The rest of my lunch was just good, so I didn't complain.  I bet it must really be a challenge for small restaurants to have the lowly paid kitchen staff  follow the instruction?  It's because I've noticed in a lot of small restaurants, the quality of food is not so consistent, sometimes it was great,  then the food wasn't as good in the next visit, and then it went back to good again in the following week.  Very often, the owner chefs in these small restaurants have great recipes, but it was the execution of the kitchen  staff that messed up the quality, like the prep-staff who cut the meat in the wrong direction...

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