I know I wrote two weeks ago that Takashi Yagihashi’s Slurping Turtle won the izakaya/yakitori style war, a trend that’s quickly becoming as tired and oversaturated as cupcake burgers. But that was before I visited Yusho, from former Charlie Trotter’s chef de cuisine Matthias Merges, a dim, narrow, bustling spot in Avondale, a neighborhood that can actually use something along these lines.
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But more about him later. This is Merges’s show, and he stands in front of the tiny open kitchen expediting and eagle eyeing every piece of meat on the gas and charcoal grills, offering direction to the line cooks or the occasional thumbs-up for Petrusky’s platings. It’s impossible to overstate how the primal act of applying direct flame to all manner of foods caused the human brain to grow, but here the skewers are garnished and accented with a mostly Japanese palette of interesting exotica that recalls the same precise and audacious flavoring schemes that Trotter’s became known for decades ago. That’s in substance if not style; unfussy constructions rule, particularly with generously loaded skewers such as billowing ribbons of beef tongue dressed with Malaysian chile sauce, or thick blocks of glazed pork belly topped with kimchi and funky fermented black garlic, or sweetbreads with toasted soybeans and tart barbecue sauce made from Japanese dried plums. Nonanimal options are almost as meaty in their savoriness: a grilled leek formation is slathered with acidic miso and fried shallot, a plank of dense tofu is topped with chrysanthemum and pineapple.
That creamy, runny egg, a nod to David Chang’s famous 5:10 slow-cooked chicken spawn, appears again in one of Yusho’s larger offerings, a “Logan ‘poser’ ramen” accompanied by a breaded and mustard-drizzled deep- fried skewer of reconstituted pig tail meat, two fantastic bites that can’t reconcile with their accompanying broth, which performs in the mouth like a viscid hot vegetable oil. A few other weakly executed items lowered the average: twice-fried chicken cutlets sprinkled with powdered green tea were fried far too hard to recall anything other than a school lunch patty, and a somewhat dry takoyaki, stuffed with duck confit instead of octopus and tossed with shimmering bonito flakes, suffered from too much time on the griddle.
2853 N. Kedzie 773-904-8558yusho-chicago.com
