鳥羽焼きとり (已結業)

Item: 鳥羽焼きとり
Rating: 3
Author: clayster

Toba Yakitori

17 食记

味道

环境

服务

卫生

抵食

2174

铜锣湾

$201-400

日本菜

clayster

等级3

Toba is a pretty cool place. A tight, 18-seater high-end Yakitori bar on one of the Times Sq side streets, it serves up high quality Yakitori and other tasty dishes. It’s relatively pricey though, kind of similar to Birdie and Yardbird. $42 for one small skewer of chicken - reasonable? You be the judge...

(Aside: I’ve noticed food pricing is pretty trend-dictated, and not really tied to ingredients/labor costs - ie Yakitori ingredients/labor aren’t particularly expensive, but it’s priced that way because ppl accept that price for that category. High-end ramen costs $90 when fish ball noodles cost $26 when there’s not much difference btwn ramen and fish ball noodles)

As is with Yakitori, stuff comes out when it comes out. So there’s this initial anticipatory waiting period where you see and smell the food but can’t eat and have to just sit and wait. We ordered about 15 types including chicken thigh w leek, wing, shoulder, gizzard, meatball, fresh eel, gingko nuts, mini sweet potatoes, pineapple, etc Also ordered onsen egg salad, chicken soup.

Problem: there’s basically one waitress serving 18 people. She always seemed frenetic and super-busy and unreachable and bothered if your request was slow or you were thinking about what to order. When asking for water, we saw her go back and quickly rinse off a used glass from a customer and refill with water to give to us. It was like a 2 sec rinse under the tap 😱

They also do this weird thing where when you order something from the menu, they unclearly upsell you and you end up ordering something more expensive unwittingly. We ordered the eel skewer for $78, she mumbled something incoherent to me, then we ended ordering something that cost 5x as much involuntarily. Kind of annoying

Worth going for it’s uniqueness (like teleporting to Shibuya), but with some problematic/annoying features