Our first course was the best fried dried tofu whey (yuba) we had ever had. In a Tokyo restaurant that specialized in every form of tofu, we had made our own yuba. Big squares of tofu came floating in the whey, simmering over a charcoal burner. After you ate the tofu, with onions and various sauces, you took a bamboo and rice-paper fan and waved it over the whey until a ... well, a layer of scum formed. And you scooped up the nice off-white scum with your chopsticks. But Toridori served three- by five-inch rectangles of extra-thin yuba that had been deep-fried to a crispness that melted as you chewed.
Then we ordered some yakitori—dark chicken meat on one skewer, white meat on another, livers on a third. Oishii. Means “delicious.” Then we ordered steamed chicken dumplings. Very oishii. Then we ordered fried chicken dumplings. Even more oishii. And then ...
The specialty of the house, we had read in the guide, was chicken sashimi. We had watched the husband of the proprietary couple slicing raw chicken breast extremely thin and serving up the slices in precisely staggered stacks. We had watched two stylish Japanese women, svelte (it almost goes without saying, when it comes to Japanese women) in basic black and pearls—women who gave every appearance of being a lot further removed from a low animal state than I am at best—dipping these slices into plum sauce and enjoying them. We had seen that they didn’t die.
We had had a number of nice draft beers, although Joan was not sure she was ordering them correctly. As they were medium-size draft beers, served in chunky glasses rather than in bottles, she couldn’t decide whether to use the word for tall, skinny things (nippon) or the word for short, squat things (hitatsu). In bottles they would clearly have been tall skinny things. Other words came to her mind: ni-hiki (for two animals of any shape); futari (for two people). Reluctantly, she resorted in the end to the all-purpose futatsu (meaning simply “two of those things”). Anyway, we had got several pairs of beers ordered. By this time, the husband had taken a break from his slicing to inform us that there was another pun involved in Toridori, because he came from the town of Tottori. And the wife had presented us with gifts: first a felt chicken on a chain commemorating Toridori’s fifth anniversary, and then a series of chopstick rests, which she had made herself, some of them wine-cork halves wrapped in decorative paper, some of them origami cranes, and some of them paper-wrapped and lacquered oshibori ties—the strips of plastic that go around the wet towels served before meals.
You would have ordered chicken sashimi, too, or I would have been disappointed in you. With that plum sauce, it was oishii. Pink, almost translucent, and each slice with a slender ridge of nice raw chicken skin. With that plum sauce.
toridori Kyoto-shi, Kamigyo-ku, Imadegawaw, Chienokain Sagaru (075-411-8788).
Open 5 p.m. to 10 p.m. No credit cards.
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