Yakitori Masterclass: Omakase in Shinjuku with a Second Generation Chef

Welcome. Please come in. My name is Takuma Sei. I run a yakitori restaurant. I was born in Fumoto, Fuji-san, in Shizuoka Prefecture. My father is a yakitori chef. My brothers are all yakitori chefs. The concept of the restaurant is that it specializes in yakitori, As a counter, you can use this side of the counter, but you can also use the other side of the counter. You can also use this side of the counter for parties. We grill the yakitori here, but if you look from here, you can see everything. That's the good thing about the counter. Araki-cho is a town called Hanamachi, It's a town with a lot of performers. Adults come here to eat delicious food. It's a quiet town, but it's a very nice town. We have a flower shop every week, and we grow seasonal flowers. It's spring now, so we have cherry blossoms and ki-ichigo. I first worked at a Japanese-style restaurant in Ebisu. It was a small Japanese-style restaurant about the same size as this one. Yakitori is also a part of Japanese cuisine. I thought that if I learned the basics of Japanese cuisine, I would be able to use it for yakitori. That's why I worked at a Japanese-style restaurant. The charcoal is... The one on the top is a binchotan from Kochi prefecture. If there's a lot of heat going through, the fire won't be uniform. So I try to spread it out as tightly as possible. That way, the heat is transferred to the whole thing in the same way. You can bake it here, you can bake it here, you can bake it anywhere. It's to create a state where you can bake it anywhere. It's not good to bake it too early even if it's too early. So I'm doing it in reverse order. I expect customers to come around 6 o'clock. I usually start at 3 o'clock. There's a way to rush it. I usually do it for about two and a half to three hours. I finish this work before that. I think it's unusual to bake it with a net. I've never done anything like this before. I've only done yakitori with this at work. Honestly, I don't know any other way to do it. This is Akita's Hinai Jidori. It's the first skewer on the course to be served to customers. It's really like our signboard product. The part that has a strong umami and the shape. You know, there's this fan. I'm trying to make it look like a closed fan. The reason I decided to start a yakitori restaurant was because I was born and raised in a yakitori restaurant. I've never had any doubts about starting a yakitori restaurant. I'm going to grill the chicken thighs with salt. If you overcook it, it'll get too hard and it won't be juicy. I think it's better to bake it 90% and have the chicken taste good. Scissors are the softest part. So if you overcook it, it'll be hard and dry. It's rare, and it's almost raw inside. It's like baking only the surface. I think it's best to serve it like this and eat it with wasabi. My father used to tell me to serve good food to customers. For example, there's an A and a B. If the B is good even if it's expensive, serve it. I think it's better to serve good food to customers than to make a profit from it. This is dashimaki tamago. It's a traditional Japanese dish. It's like a Japanese omelette. After you finish eating the chicken, you serve the tamagoyaki. After you finish eating the tamagoyaki, you serve the next chicken. You have to make all the yakitori one by one by hand. You have to cut the meat and stab it. You have to make all the yakitori one by one by hand. You can't make a lot at once. That's a lot of work. This is neck meat. I'll cut off the neck. I'm worried about the thickness because I'm going to cook the green onions too much. I'm going to make a lot of negi. The texture of the meat is good. And it's delicious. I wanted to use more expensive ingredients, but I couldn't because of the concept of the restaurant. By making this restaurant, I was able to use the ingredients and ingredients that I wanted to use. Next is bamboo shoot tosani. Bamboo shoots are delicious in spring, so I serve them with pickled bamboo shoots. Yakitori doesn't have a sense of season, so we serve the same yakitori all year round. I serve something that feels like the season and give the yakitori a sense of season. I've been watching my parents run a restaurant at home. The restaurant is doing well, and I'm having a lot of fun. I started this restaurant because I wanted to succeed in the yakitori business and have a fun life. There are two kinds of food, kamameshi and ramen. I heard that foreigners like ramen, so I made ramen and it went well, so I made ramen. I'm often asked why I started this restaurant. It was one of my dreams to do something like that. This is tsukune, chicken meat. And then there's the finely chopped cartilage, duck meat, and pork. Boil it once and then roll it up. Roll it up and boil it. This is served with sauce. I've been making sauce for eel and yakitori for a long time. The sauce for the eel restaurant I've been running for 50 years is the sauce from 50 years ago. So we have the best sauce from Shizuoka 46 years ago. When foreigners come to Japan to eat Japanese food, the first thing that comes to mind is sushi or ramen. Yakitori has been a traditional Japanese food for a long time. Yakitori is a dish where chicken is cut into various parts and eaten in various ways. I hope you enjoy it.