The Koyama Counter Behind Torishiki's Chef
A residential Shinagawa yakitori counter where Kunio Aihara has been breaking down chickens for four decades. The teaching house behind Torishiki.
The bird is broken down in front of you, on a small board behind the counter, and the pieces go onto skewers the size of your little finger before they hit the binchotan. There is no menu handed over. Kunio Aihara runs an omakase, and what arrives is whatever the chicken gave up that afternoon — thigh, breast, oyster, skin, liver, the parts most Tokyo yakitori counters keep off the tourist list. The seasoning is salt or a house tare, applied with the precision of someone who has been doing this since the 1970s.
Toriki sits on a quiet residential lane in Koyama, a Shinagawa neighbourhood that sees no drop-in trade. Aihara has been at this counter for decades, and Torishiki, the Meguro counter that most visitors to Tokyo have heard of, learned its craft here. This is the teaching house. It is also the harder table to book, and the one fewer people can find.
The counter that trained Torishiki, run by the man who taught him, and most of the internet is looking at the wrong Toriki.
Editorial Deep
The birds are broken down in the shop, on the day, and the skewering happens where you can see it — which sounds like a small detail until you notice how few Tokyo yakitori counters at this level still do all of it in-house. Aihara puts the more delicate cuts — the oyster, the tail, the soft inner thigh — on smaller skewers so they cook at the rate the meat wants, not the rate the grill dictates. The result on the plate is chicken that arrives at the exact seam between rare and done, with the fat rendered and the skin snapping.
At 5:30 on a weeknight the counter is quiet, the grill is settling in, and Aihara is prepping in near silence — this is the seating for eating, if that is what you came to do. By eight the room has filled out with regulars and a few obvious out-of-towners, the beer orders have caught up with the skewer count, and the noise off the counter is the sound of chicken fat hitting charcoal and a chef talking to people he has known for years. Both work; they are different evenings.
Halfway through the course Aihara looked up, registered that one of us was slowing down on the tare skewers, and switched the next two to salt without a word being spoken about it. That is the level. There is no English menu and the conversation across the counter runs in Japanese, but the reading of the room is the kind you get from a chef who has watched forty years of diners eat his food.
Torishiki, the Meguro counter that Aihara trained, sits meaningfully higher on the bill for a comparable omakase, and the table there is materially harder to reach on a first trip to Tokyo. On the food, the gap is smaller than the price gap — the Meguro room polishes what this one already does. For a serious yakitori dinner in Tokyo at this tier, Toriki is the better-value seat by a clear margin.
Do not come back if the phone call in Japanese is a barrier you have not solved, if a train transfer out to a residential Shinagawa lane on a weeknight sounds like an errand rather than the evening, or if you want a chef who explains each skewer in English as it lands. This is not a room for a first Tokyo dinner and it is not a room for a group that wants to talk over the counter.
What to eat
Don't miss.
The salt skewers — breast, oyster, and the soft inner thigh — paced across the omakase
“The teaching house behind Torishiki, and the better-value seat of the two.”
Book Toriki in Koyama if you want the whole-bird craft without the Meguro price or the Meguro waitlist; book Torishiki if the polish of a one-star room is what you came to Tokyo for. Do not confuse this counter with the Sumida or Nakano Toriki — different rooms, different chefs.
The Verdict
