One Bird, A Thousand Treasures

Itcha Manpou
Yanai City

Japanese dining is always a daunting thing to endeavour alone. So many things that are, to the untrained Gaijin eye, utterly unrecognisable adorn a menu that is illegible to anyone but the fluent and the native. Indeed, unless I can see from the outside that the menu has pictures, I am ever dubious about entering an establishment. It’s just all a little much really.

So with an ounce of excitement and a gaggle of Westerners; an ex-American corporal, an Aussie oil-tanker steward and English teacher Alex’s wife Yoshika, I entered the unassuming yakitori restaurant Itch Manpou (“One bird, a thousand treasures”).

The place is typically Japanese; bar-counter seats make up the furnishings of the smoky but somehow homely establishment, with a party room out back for the more rowdy customers. Alas this time, those were not us.

With Yoshika at the helm, we were taken on a journey through an entire farmyard of meats, beginning, quite frighteningly, with a chicken sashimi (raw, sliced meat). Now, the first lesson you are taught in the kitchen is that you never, under any circumstances, serve uncooked chicken. However, having seen Bourdain imbibe of raw fowl flesh, and under Yoshika’s reassurance, I dove in eagerly. The taste? I guess somehow similar in texture to Parma ham, with its flavour mostly made up (as with most sashimi) of the sauce in which it is served. But it was, surprisingly, quite delicious. And I’m still alive.

After this tentative start, we were presented with a mouth-watering array of different yakitori (essentially Japanese kebabs); a perfectly tender skewer of rib meat, a chicken wing stuffed with gyoza (Chinese dumpling), some delicious pork balls (not literally), and the most sublime piece of duck I’ve had in a long time. Many other sticks of various beast came and went (only one of which, a pork belly meat infused with Japanese basil and ume, I did not wolf down with aplomb), but the highlight of the meal was something I have been waiting to cross off my Things to Eat list for some time now; horse carpaccio.

With its subtle yet gamey flavour and curiously tender texture, horse meat (or "basashi" as it's locally known) was something of a surprise to me. The soy and ginger in which it was served complimented the meat perfectly, making it a real highlight of the evening. I know it’s a little taboo, but when in Rome…

With our stomachs sated, it was time to move on to the heavy drinking, and although the Japanese can’t really hold their liquor, they certainly know how to make it. An array of shochu and sake the likes of which I could never have imagined arrived in front of us. We had ume-shu (Japanese apricot), ocho-ume (green tea and apricot), strawberry, lemon… An entire rainbow of rice-based liqueurs, each outdoing the previous in both flavour and smoothness. And though not one of us dared try the tomato sake, I believe that given a few more shots, we would’ve been game for anything.

Yakitori, like the vast majority of Japanese cuisine, certainly isn’t the dining experience for the faint hearted or weak stomached. Or indeed for vegetarians. But one thing is for sure; Itcha Manpou delivered some of the finest food I have eaten since arriving in Japan, each dish thought through thoroughly to bring out the very best in the meat, whether it be fresh from the bone or char-grilled to perfection. Top notch chaps. Campai!