Jun Takahashi has lived in Mount Prospect for a year now, but with his wife still back home in Tokyo, he’s often left to his own devices. He’s a 29-year-old business analyst for Mizkan Americas, a Japanese-owned corporation that makes vinegars, cooking wines, and other Asian sauces and condiments. About once a week he goes to a small izakaya a few minutes’ drive from his house. “For me it’s really comfortable to be there because of the master,” he says. “I speak with him regularly. It’s not really my home, but I feel like it’s a room in my house.”
In Elk Grove Village, Hiroko Kitazawa resists calling her Kurumaya Japanese Kitchen an izakaya, but her daughter Stephanie, who lives in Tokyo, says it’s a lot closer to the modern Japanese pub than she thinks. In the daytime it’s popular with an international clientele—Americans, Chinese, or Koreans who come in for noodles or main dishes—but at night it fills up with guys in jackets and loosened ties, nibbling on salted grilled beef tongue (gyutan shioyaki) or creamy, crunchy deep-fried potato and beef croquettes. The Cubs’ Kosuke Fukudome and former Sox player Tadahito Iguchi have been here.
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The name is Japanglish for “thank you,” but it also stands for the numbers three and nine, a recurring motif in the dining room, where glass cabinets hold labeled shochu bottles reserved for regulars. Yoshida’s 29-year-old son Ken says his father is of the whole-beast school of cheffery, using every part of the chickens he gets in—which should make you feel virtuous about eating the tori kawa, a deliciously fatty chicken skin salad tossed with garlic, chile paste, miso, sake, and mirin. When I ate here with Jun Takahashi, he was enraptured when he tasted the incredibly rich tori liver—chicken liver steamed for hours in soy sauce, mirin, sake, and Worcestershire. He imagined himself nibbling on it in front of a baseball game, between puffs on a smoke and sips of shochu.
Among these three places, Tori Shin comes closest to an old-school izakaya. In 1975 Kaneko left Niigata Prefecture for America, telling his mother he’d return in just a few years. He worked in Pittsburgh at the Benihana-style steak house Samurai, and then joined forces with a friend who took over Tori Shin in 1982. Eleven years ago Kaneko bought him out.
Boozin’ Food: Ten more Japanese restaurants with full bars
One look at the nightly specials menu at West Town’s Arami should jar anyone out of his sushi-ordering routine. Sushi chef B.K. Park, a veteran of Mirai, Meiji, and Aria, leaves the spicy-mayo-tempura-crunch frippery to everyone else, instead focusing on the fundamentals of traditional Japanese cooking: rice, fish, soy, seaweed. Park’s sushi showcases outstanding quality and character across a wide variety of fish, both familiar (tuna, salmon, yellowtail) and less common (madai, kampachi, shima aji). Even if you don’t opt for omakase (chef’s choice), pieces arrive in an experience-enhancing progression, starting with the most delicate and ramping up in intensity throughout the meal. Though some folks might be unnerved by sashimi that stares back, the whole aji (horse mackerel)—sliced off the bone into silvery wisps and artfully reassembled and arranged with flowers—is a spectacular beginning. This species belies mackerel’s oily, fishy reputation, especially when paired with Park’s ginger-chive dipping sauce. At the top end of the intensity scale is the toro hand roll, in which incredibly rich tuna belly is chopped into smooth submission, fat threatening to melt into the rice—it’s an instant candidate for last-meal consideration. Superpremium California Tamaki Gold is the rice of choice here. Cooked and seasoned to exacting specs, the tangy grains barely cling together when formed into bite-size fingers for nigiri—what a difference from the cold, sticky rice bombs so often found hiding out under slabs of weepy tuna. Other thoughtful details include house-pickled ginger, crisp sheets of toasted nori, and a fine selection of loose-leaf teas. Despite all the attention to tradition, Arami isn’t some hushed temple of sushi. The simple space is casual—hipsters, families, and neighbors quickly fill up the small room on any given night. Homey dishes like steaming bowls of pork-belly ramen, short rib donburi, and broiled octopus salad come from the kitchen tucked behind the sushi bar. But though the cooked stuff is competent, it doesn’t shine the way the raw does. One exception is the broiled fish collar that appears regularly on the specials menu. Rare at the bone and blistered on the surface, this gnarly hunk of sushi-grade fish neck is like the seafood version of a porterhouse steak. BYO to begin with, Arami now has an interesting beverage program from owners Troy and Ty Fujimura, who also own Small Bar and the Exchange. —Kristina Meyer
The civically named Chizakaya, from chef-owner Harold Jurado (Sunda, Japonais, Trotter’s), feels less like a comfortable, friendly bar than a small-plates restaurant with a remarkable sake list (curated by former L2O sommelier Chantelle Pabros)—its conviviality is in some ways hobbled by fine-dining touches. Chef de cuisine Robert Rubba (another L2O vet) executes Jurado’s wide-ranging menu before a pair of communal tables, most notably a selection of simple yakitori: skewered fatty chicken skins, squeaky gizzards, steaky ribbons of beef tongue, juicy white turnips, and shisito peppers. Along with bites such as florid, delicate pig ears deep-fried pork-rind style, plates of pickles, and slices of hamachi sashimi layered with rich, fatty bone marrow, these are exactly the sort of alcohol-abetting snacks that keep salarymen drinking and singing without horking (too soon) into their sake boxes. Whoever controls the restaurant’s Twitter feed has at times seemed sensitive to the suggestions that it’s not an actual izakaya. But if the kitchen could consistently execute every dish as well as it does the crispy, greasy-good deep-fried chicken thighs or the cold soba noodles with feathery shrimp tempura, nobody would care at all how authentic it was. Chizakaya will be closed December 24 and 25. —Mike Sula
Kurumaya Japanese Kitchen 1201 E. Higgins, Elk Grove Village 847-437-2222
Izakaya Sankyu Japanese Restaurant
1176 S. Elmhurst, Mount Prospect 847-228-5539
