The Age of “Maximum Fixed Price”! Background of the rapid increase in all-you-can-eat luxury yakitori and French cuisine

It’s like a festival!

Eat whatever you want, as much as you want. It is the dream of mankind. You may say, “There are cheap buffets and lunch buffets,” but stuffing your stomach full of frozen foods and commercial delicacies (although quite tasty) is a bit empty, isn’t it?

Recently, however, an increasing number of upscale restaurants have adopted a “limited price system. French restaurants where you can order as much as you like from the menu for ¥100 per course, or yakitori restaurants where you can have as many as you want…it’s like a festival-like event. There are four such all-you-can-eat restaurants that Nekoda is aware of, so I’ll report on how great they are.

The price for men is 8,800 yen, and the price for women is 6,800 yen for all-you-can-eat and drink at Charcoal Yakitori Sakamori.

The first restaurant is “Charcoal Grill Yakitori Sakamori”. It is located in Kitashinchi, a prestigious area in Osaka that is like Tokyo’s Ginza, and is visited by club members and the wealthy. This restaurant offers all-you-can-eat yakitori and vegetable skewers for 8,800 yen for men and 6,800 yen for women. Alcohol is also all-you-can-drink. You may say, “Toriki is cheaper,” but here you can enjoy authentic yakitori made from a brand of chicken called “Kyo-aka Jidori,” which is carefully grilled over charcoal by professional grillers.

After appetizers and the first skewer, all-you-can-eat starts!

The course starts with 5 appetizers and 8 skewers, and after you finish them, all-you-can-eat starts. Many restaurants have this kind of system. The first thing they do is to make you full so that you will not order more. Do not look at it in a way that makes you think, “They are trying to make me full first so that I will not order too much! The appetizers are a little too much for the sake until the yakitori is served. They can also ask you to cut off anything you don’t need.

The appetizers look like this. Chicken soup, raw vegetables, bruschetta with chicken, salmon roe and parmesan cheese, condiments (tartar sauce, mustard, red wine salt, yuzu pepper, ground sesame salt), salted bread, zunda croquette.

Zunda croquette is very rare. I asked the owner, “Are you from Sendai? I asked him, “No, I had it somewhere and it was delicious, so I decided to serve it! The answer was simple.

The chicken soup is better than Tenka Ippin’s rich chicken soup (Nekoda’s comparison).

I was so shocked by the taste of this chicken soup that my head almost turned gray in an instant. It is one of the three best soups I have ever had in my life. The aroma and taste are 1000% chicken. It can be described as the “Tenka Ippin” soup with a slightly dryer, thicker, more chicken-like flavor. After drinking it, your lips will be covered with chicken extract.

He said that 15 liters of broth made from the bones of Kyoto red chicken and domestic chicken meat is concentrated to 2 liters over a period of 6 hours. It is a good thing that the soup is saturated.

I wonder if they will sell this chicken soup for about 5,000 yen per liter.

Eight jab-like skewers to start.

So, here are the 8 starter skewers. The contents change from day to day, but first up are Negima, Aged Chicken, and Harami. Chickens covered with juices, shining brightly and looking divine.

Then, chicken wings, tsukune, asparagus, eringi mushrooms, and yam. I thought, “Caviar on the tsukune? I thought it was caviar, but it was tonburi. The taste is not so different from caviar. The skin of the chicken wing was crispy and fatty, and the meat was easy to eat as it was separated from the bone. I asked the chef about it, and he told me they take the trouble to remove one bone to make it easier to remove the meat from the bone. What a fine hospitality!

You can enjoy a considerable taste festival with five different kinds of condiments, such as wine salt (homemade by boiling Cabernet Sauvignon and salt) on the asparagus and yuzu kosho on the tsukune (skewers).

Some people are full just from this first round. If you have such a small appetite, don’t come here! Nekoda starts to get serious from here.

More than 100 kinds of sake are available for all-you-can-drink!

You can drink as much sake as you want. We have about 10 kinds of high-class gins such as “Ki no Bi”, more than 30 kinds of high-class whiskey, draft beer, sake, wine, cocktails…and the owner loves wine, so he serves it by the glass. The owner is also a wine lover, so there are more than 25 kinds of wine by the glass. Yakitori and wine go well together.

The festival has begun! All-you-can-eat from over 30 kinds of skewers!

Now, after finishing “Today’s Eight Skewers”, you can freely order anything you like from the “Skewers Available Today” Woo hoo! It’s a liberating feeling, like making your high school debut after compulsory education is over. And you can even order more from the eight skewers you just ate. Of course, I was ready to order all of them, but here is what I ordered anyway.

Dakimi, Bonjiri, and Seseri. Dakimi” is a tender part of the breast meat wrapped in the skin, and you can enjoy the oily skin and light flavor. The seseri is overflowing with fat and the sourness of the plum paste goes well with it.

Next is the zucchini topped with white meat cheese, kawa, and dengaku miso. The shiitake mushrooms are covered with minced chicken inside. It’s a nifty little trick!

The “white liver” was to die for. Nekoda is the only one who likes foie gras even though he cannot eat internal organs, but this was so good that I doubted many times that it was foie gras! I was so suspicious of foie gras many times. He said it goes well with red Syrah. Indeed, it is such a good match that I could drink this combination forever.

The skewers are grilled one by one by a skilled artisan.

I must explain the greatness of the yakitori here. For starters, the meat is huge. Other restaurants usually cut a piece of meat to about 20 grams, but here the meat is cut into 40 to 60 grams.

The person grilling the meat is a professional chef with many years of experience in Japanese cuisine. Each piece of Kyo-aka Jidori chicken is carefully grilled over Tosa binchotan charcoal. He says, “Because the chicken is so big, it has a lot of fat and burns easily, so you have to turn it frequently. He also changes the grilling position every few seconds to ensure even cooking of all the meat.

The owner was a very successful businessman.

By the way, I didn’t explain the boss of this restaurant well. He said, “Showing his face? I don’t want to! The owner is a young businessman named Mr. Morikawa. In fact, “Sakamori” is not his main business, but he originally ran eight photo studios specializing in children’s photography in the Osaka area, and his franchise bakery is also located in Minamimorimachi. Moreover, he runs a video recipe site called “Zuborameshi,” which has a whopping 400,000 Instagram followers! He must be making a lot of money.

I have met Mr. Morikawa several times, and every time I see him, three things come to mind: “He must live in a townhouse,” “He must have been naughty when he was young,” and “He looks like he surfs (because of his tan ). When Mr. Morikawa saw this manuscript, he denied everything, saying, “I don’t live in a townhouse! He denied everything (laugh).

He is 42 years old. The same age as Nekota! What a gap between me, a working poor writer, and him!

But why did he come up with such an unbeatable restaurant system? When I asked him, he replied, “Because it’ s easy to pay the bill! If there are many items on the menu, it’s a hassle for the staff to ask and calculate each one, and that slows down the speed of serving. I’m an impatient person. It’s true that smart people are impatient. But when asked why he chose yakitori restaurant, he replied, “I like yakitori, so I go to yakitori restaurants twice a week. Decisive people are simple and clear about everything. When I asked him if he had a favorite yakitori restaurant, he immediately answered, “I guess I would have to say Toriki. Honestly!

I was ready to order all the rest of the menu, but he told me, “Order only what you can serve within the two-hour time limit…” I really wanted to eat more than that. I really wanted to gobble down more, but I reluctantly decided to stop ordering the skewers because I wanted to introduce the closing menu.

Oh, yes, I was talking about why the skewers are on toast, wasn’t I? The reason for this was Mr. Morikawa’s plan to keep the yakitori from getting cold. I hate it when yakitori gets cold,” he said. It makes even good food tasteless. Indeed. The toast, which has absorbed a lot of chicken fat, tastes great at the end of the meal. The bread is also from the bakery of the franchise restaurant, and the milky flavor with lots of cream is also delicious with the fat…. Yakitori that even the plate tastes good!

A menu that is superb all the way to the end!

After finishing the yakitori, you can finish your meal. Of course, poor Nekoda chose the egg on rice with salmon roe.

I did not pay attention to the nyumen, thinking, “Why should I eat something like that for lunch at home? The soup of this nyu-men is 100% chicken broth, the very thick chicken broth that came first. If I had known that, I would have ordered it (it was written on the menu). When I complained, they served me nyumen as a big service. It was as good as I had dreamed….

In fact, they also served mascarpone and bean-jam buns for dessert at the end of the meal, but I won’t go into that here.

Anyway, the two hours I spent at this restaurant was a dreamy and rewarding experience of my life. The owner, Mr. Morikawa, is a bit scary looking at first, but he is not scary at all. He is just impatient (laughs).

I secretly asked Shun, an employee, if the owner is kind to him. He teaches me everything carefully. What a white company! I wish I could get a job at Nekota too! And in May, they opened another all-you-can-eat, all-you-can-drink “Kushi-shabu Sakamori” in Kitashinchi, using the same system. They can’t stop making rapid progress, can they?

Charcoal-grilled Yakitori Sakamori: 2F Houju Building, 2-2-38 Dojima, Kita-ku, Osaka City

Click here for owner Morikawa’s video recipe site “Zuborameshi.

The other three restaurants will be introduced in a rush.

The first is “Gibier MIYAMA,” an all-you-can-eat French restaurant in a back alley of Gion.

The first four dishes are all-you-can-eat, and the second four dishes are all-you-can-eat. After the first four dishes, about 30 kinds of dishes are all-you-can-eat. And these are not your ordinary French dishes, but rather ultra-luxurious dishes made with deer, wild boar, and bear hunted in Miyama-cho, a mountainous area in Kyoto. The menu includes such delicacies as “Moon Bear and Lily Root Gratin” and “Charcoal Grilled Special Deer and Duck. In addition to gibier, the menu also features dishes that make heavy use of premium ingredients, such as “Char-grilled Scallops with Undan Soy Sauce” and “Pasta with Black Truffle and Mushrooms. The black truffle pasta is so good that it is one of the top three dishes Nekoda would like to eat before he dies.

This restaurant used to charge 12,000 yen for a course. Since then, the chef in the back of the room was crying, “Wow, he ordered something with a high cost ratio again! I was worried that the chef might have cried in the back of the restaurant every time an order came in, so I was relieved that I could eat at this price without any hesitation. However, Nekota’s financial resources were not enough to go there, so I asked a rich guy to buy me a drink (laughs)!

Gibier MIYAMA: 279-3 Gion-cho, Higashiyama-ku, Kyoto City

Dontsuki: 27-3, Gion-cho north side, Higashiyama-ku, Kyoto City.

Located in Momiji Koji, a renovated machiya townhouse complex, Dontsuki is another kappo restaurant where you can order anything you like from the menu for a fixed price of 6,600 yen. The restaurant offers four dishes recommended by the owner at the beginning of the meal, from which you can order about 20 different dishes. After quickly devouring the first four dishes, such as “fried onion and potato” and “wild boar in black tea,” I ordered as many dishes as I wanted, including “wagyu beef with meat and potatoes,” “abalone fritters with liver sauce,” and “sashimi of Mie Prefecture tuna zabuton. The portions are small, so there is plenty of time to finish all the dishes!

Dontsuki: H8 Momiji no Koji, 682-4 Ishifudono-cho, Matsubara-dori, Fuyacho Higashi-iru, Shimogyo-ku, Kyoto City

Yakitori Enami” is a restaurant where you can eat and drink for 3 hours for 6,000 yen.

This is a strange system. First of all, there are three courses of yakitori: 5 pieces for 2,500 yen, 7 pieces for 3,000 yen, and 9 pieces for 3,500 yen, all including 2 kinds of chicken sashimi, pickles, a la carte dishes, and chicken soup. Additional orders are 300 yen per piece, and no matter how much you overpay, you only have to pay 6,000 yen. The cost of alcohol is also included. So, if you have a small appetite, you can add a few more pieces to your course and pay less than 6,000 yen, while a big eater like Nekoda can drink and eat more than 6,000 yen and get the most out of it. As the second branch of the popular yakitori restaurant “sosin” in Osaka City, the manager, who is also a yakitori chef, has an excellent technique for cooking the meat. With more than 20 kinds of skewers, including kyokamo (Kyoto duck), dakimimi, and seseri garlic, as well as “adult liver pate” and “red chicken thigh tataki,” three hours at the counter will fly by in a blink of an eye.

Yakitori Enami: 5-6-8 Nishitenma, Kita-ku, Osaka City

These are just four restaurants with a flat-rate fee that is so great, you won’t believe your ears. I wondered if such restaurants existed in Tokyo. I tried looking, but while Brazilian restaurants offering all-you-can-eat churrasco and all-you-can-eat yakiniku chain restaurants appear, I can’t find any high-end yakitori or French all-you-can-eat restaurants. I guess many of the restaurants are in Kansai, so I guess I’ve turned my back on them. If anyone knows of any restaurants in Tokyo, please let me know.