Yakitori Surprise

We went to a very nice yakitori restaurant last night for food on a stick. You can’t go wrong at a restaurant where an entire section of the menu is entitled “skin”.

The four of us ordered a variety of skewered food. My favorites were the spicy chicken meatballs and the asparagus wrapped in bacon. Very tasty and in manageable bites. Getting adventurous, we started ordering other things on the menu, and believing that there must be some sort of translation error, we ordered the “sparrow”. We imagined that to be some sort of game bird pieces on sticks.

Imagine how you would react if a fully formed and grilled baby bird was suddenly dropped in front of you, complete with skinny little neck and fully formed head. It was unnerving to say the least. Being game, each of us eventually bit off a wing (bones and all) and managed to force it down. It tasted like very strong liver.

We spent the rest of the evening eating anything else to get rid of that flavor and texture and making jokes that seemed progressively entertaining as the sparrow experience began to fade.

• If I get hungry before breakfast, I’ll just get something off the windowsill.
• So how do you catch sparrows for food? With a plate glass window? Whack! There’s dinner!
• And more in that vein.

By the way, we checked with our Japanese friends, and they don’t eat sparrow either. It must be on the menu just to test foreigners’ willingness to eat just about anything placed in front of them at a Japanese restaurant.