Udon: check. Sushi: check, check; Ramen: check. Our tour of the major Japanese food genres continued at dinner on our second day with an excellent meal of yakitori or grilled chicken at Hinai Stand in Monzen Nakacho. Our apartment was located a 25 minute walk from Mon Naka, as the neighbourhood is popularly known, and we’d strolled down to Hinai Stand the previous evening in the hope of snagging a table without a reservation. These hopes were dashed but while there we made a reservation for the next evening and presented ourselves again at the appointed time. Here’s how it went.
Hinai Stand—so named because they utilize only the meat of the Japanese Hinai breed of chicken—is not easy to spot. They’re located down a dark alley. Okay, I take it back. They’re pretty easy to spot: there’s a menu displayed at the entrance to the alley letting you know they’re down there. And the grill smoke emanating from the vents is a dead give-away as you approach. As with almost every restaurant we ate at in Japan, it is not a large restaurant. But they pack quite a few seats into the space. There are several along the counter overlooking the kitchen and then a number of two and four-tops with tall stools around them. We squeezed past other diners to our table in the back and got down to business.
The staff don’t speak very much English but they are friendly and welcoming anyway. The normal clientele appears to be young Japanese people on the way back from work. We were the only non-Japanese people in the house as far as I could make out (and I hadn’t seen any the previous evening either). You’ll be handed Japanese language food and drink menus as you sit down but if, like us, you don’t read Japanese, you don’t need to break out Google Lens/Translate on your phone. This because the actual ordering is done via a qr code at the table and that ordering menu has an English option. You don’t have to order everything at once. We got a few things to start and kept adding to the order as we went and closed it out at the end.
We started with some drinks and a few appetizers: lightly pickled cucumber, shaved Japanese radish with pickled nameko mushrooms, and homemade tofu. All were good—and the cucumber was very refreshing after a walk in high heat/humidity—but the chilled tofu was particularly excellent with mild nutty flavour (till we poured the seasoned soy sauce over) and lovely soft/dense texture (if that makes sense).
And then the parade of chicken bits on skewers began. What did we get? Heart (2x), gizzard, breast with yuzu pepper (2x), breast with skin (2x), negima/breast with green onion (2x), shishito peppers, shiitake mushrooms, wing (2x), meatball with lemon (2x), sobiles and obi (very specific cuts of thigh) and bonjiri (fatty tail meat). In addition, we got an order of chazuke with dashi broth which was quite lovely. How were the skewers? Excellent. Particular highlights were the heart, the breast with yuzu pepper, the sobiles and obi, the bonjiri and the shishitos. By the way, for most/all of the chicken you can specify when you order whether you’d like it to be “rare” or cooked through. We got all of ours cooked through.
The older boy enjoyed his pineapple soda as well; and I very much enjoyed my highball with Nikka Sessions whisky. We enjoyed the hot-sticky walk back to our flat after rather less.
For a look at the restaurant and everything we ate, launch the slideshow below. Scroll down to see how much it all cost and to see what’s coming next from Tokyo.
When we closed out our order the screen directed to go pay at the front on our way out. Total? 11350 yen or just about $76 for everything we ate and drank. As I have been saying and will be saying of every one of our meals on this trip, this was a steal compared to anywhere in the US for food of much higher quality than available in the US. Excellent yakitori is doubtless available all over Tokyo—and there are some specialists that charge a lot more—but if you’re within range of Mon Naka, I’d highly recommend Hinai Stand.
What’s up next from Tokyo? More sushi (that’ll be this weekend) and then a report on a meal centered on katsu (that’ll go up next week).