This week, I traveled to downtown Berkeley
to review Ippuku, Christian Geideman's yakitori restaurant. To me, the beauty of the restaurant came from the narrowness of its focus: Geideman's menu has several dozen dishes, but they're made with a relatively small number of ingredients and techniques. Like the best California cuisine, that reduced focus has allowed the chef and his cooks to zero in on what they're doing. Few of the skewers were overcooked. Almost everything was precisely, subtly seasoned. I'd love to see more of the all-purpose Japanese restaurants in town pick a specialty and redline the rest of their menus ― we'd eat much better for it.
And, of course, the chickens Geideman sources are of the highest quality. The variety of flavors and textures he coaxes out of a single bird is spectacular. A warning: Ippuku has received two positive reviews in one week, and so many of the individual skewers may be out when you go ― that's whole animal cooking for you.
In addition, consider Lara Hata's slideshow of the yakitori and drinks at Ippuku your antidote to this week's gross-food meme. Making the rounds of the blogs and Facebook status updates is this picture of "mechanically separated chicken,"
beak-to-tail forcemeat extruded into a thick pink swirl, which seems to
set off many people's gag responses. (Truth be told, I'm not quite sure
what the fuss is all about. Do you not know what ground meat, even the sustainably raised stuff,
looks like?) Using up all the parts of the chicken need not be a
disgusting spectacle, even for those of you who only eat boneless,
skinless chicken breasts because the sight of bones makes you feel weak.
