Jay Rayner’s new favourite yakitori restaurant

When Kuangyi Wei’s favourite yakitori restaurant in London, Humble Chicken, changed to a tasting-menu-only format, she was bereft. She had liked choosing from a list of delicious smoky things on sticks.

The solution, she decided, was to open her own place. Beijing-born Wei already had a job. She was a management consultant; a highly respected one who turned up on the Today programme explaining the knottier points of trade and tariffs policy. She is still a management consultant, but in the evenings you might find her here, working the floor of her polished box of a restaurant on the edge of the City, with its blonde wood fixtures and its soft downlighters and its curving mid-century modern style furniture.

She delivers dishes to the tables shyly, as if service is a new look she has only just tried on. Perhaps it is. She is not the only member of staff to have run away from banking to join the hospitality circus. “Mike, on the grill over there,” she says, pointing at a big-shouldered man in the open kitchen, “used to be in derivatives pricing, which is really dull.” She has liberated him from derivatives so he can be here full time, fretting gently over the coals. They found their Japanese head chef on “an online backpackers’ forum”.

This makes Hotori, which opened in November, sound like an amateur enterprise launched on ragged puffs of goodwill and hope. It is not. Hotori, which means “in the neighbourhood of” in Japanese, is as good as any yakitori restaurant I have tried in Tokyo, and better than many there. It’s rich in precision and attention to detail. There is balance and poise. Wei describes it as a “beak to tail” yakitori restaurant, which means there is no part of a chicken they will not put on a stick, season robustly and grill until the skin is crisp, the meat is bronzed and the juices are running.

While not every cut is available every day, they offer at least 17, including parts even the chicken may not be aware it has. There is the “furisode” or chicken shoulder. “Named after a Kimono style with swinging sleeves,” the menu explains, “the cut connects the wing and the breast.” There is “obi” or inner thigh, “the small piece of red muscle right next to the thigh bone”. There is gizzard and neck, liver and, tonight, there is knee. We will return to the chicken’s knee.

With 48 hours’ notice, they will prepare them all for £110. Alternatively, you can have one of the set menus or just order what’s available that day for £7 each. These cuts are not from any old bird. They come from Fosse Meadows chickens, the bourgeoisie of fowl, allowed a little more age and, doubtless, massages and psychotherapy sessions. Or perhaps just a really big field to wander. I am well acquainted with these birds, with their deep flavour and their hardy skins, because my local butcher stocks them. I have enjoyed roasting them at home; I am enjoying them even more here.

We have the flats of wings, opened out to provide maximum surface area for the grill, and to stretch the heavily seasoned skin, so it crisps all over. There is the oyster, the lozenge of dark meat on the underside that in French is rightly known as the part only the idiot leaves behind. There is a layer of fat beneath the skin which adds to those running juices. Bouncy chicken hearts are glazed in an ocean-ripe kombu sauce; leg comes in another slick of sauce, salty with pancetta.

A bronzed ball of minced chicken, formed into a pointed oval, comes with a soy-cured egg yolk for a mouth-coating dip. As for those knees, a jointed piece of cartilage, they have a soft and not unappealing crunch. It may be an acquired taste. Obviously, all of this tastes of chicken, but in the most intense way; by turns crisp and succulent, as if each skewer is the very best part of the Sunday roast that you were holding out for. The difference between each may seem marginal, but there’s a nerdy delight to be taken in the small contrasts of texture and seasoning.

There are other things. Blackened shishito peppers, which come under a heap of bonito flakes (smoked, dried tuna), so delicate they wave back and forth in the rising currents of heat. There are crunchy pickled vegetables in yellows, reds and greens with an ideal balance of sour to sweet, which look like a cheery illustration from a children’s book. There are slices of lightly tensed, cured mackerel with a nose-bashing pile of fresh wasabi. The only misstep is a soft-shell crab tempura, which arrives tepid and soggy, as if the fryer never quite got hot enough. It is notable precisely because everything else is so on point, even the black sesame ice cream from the afterthought of a dessert list which offers just three choices.

The mood here tonight can only be described as mellow and grown-up. Three men are eating alone along the counter around the kitchen, each with an ice bucket of something chilled and interesting. To one side, is a table celebrating a birthday, in the restrained way of the gently middle-aged. To the other side, is a party of intense-looking cooks including, as it happens, Angelo Sato, the head chef of Humble Chicken, the yakitori restaurant in Soho whose menu change inspired Kuangyi Wei to open Hotori.

Sato is still a couple of weeks from learning that his tasting menu has won him his second Michelin star. I ask him his opinion of Hotori. He is effusive. He knows the good stuff and this is it. In return, he asks me if I have a favourite yakitori restaurant in London. “Yes,” I say. “I do now.”

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