A Chicken in Every Course

In one of the best books ever written about eating, Joseph Wechsberg’s “Blue Trout and Black Truffles,” there is a story about a Viennese restaurant famous for its extremely specific cuts of boiled beef and a general who came in every day for the tafelspitz and refused to settle for a slightly different cut of beef the afternoon the tafelspitz dissolved into the broth. As long as men refuse to compromise on matters of taste, Wechsberg seems to imply, everything will be all right with the world.

I think of that story almost every time I walk into Kokekokko, a small yakitori restaurant in Little Tokyo that serves nothing but various skewers of grilled chicken, from every part of the bird, cooked medium-rare. Kokekokko caters to levels of chicken connoisseurship most of us will probably never develop; an appreciation of the particular striations of one particular muscle in a chicken breast, the flavor of the right thigh over the left, an ability to identify feed and breed and gender with one small bite into a charcoal-broiled leg. This may be the only place in town that serves chicken-breast sashimi, a Japanese delicacy described in Shizuo Tsuji’s famous “Japanese Cooking: A Simple Art.”

Kokekokko, named for the sound a rooster makes, has the rustic look familiar to anyone who’s seen an Ozu picture or two, walls of peeled logs, hollow stumps as stools, big sake bottles stacked and arranged artfully as a fancy supermarket display. The dining room, half counter seating, half not, is hazy with chicken smoke coming off the hardwood grills and crowded with everyone from elegantly dressed couples stopping in after an opera at the Music Center to guys who look a little like unemployed 7-Eleven clerks, and more than a few salary-men, several sakes into their evenings, whose loosened Windsor knots droop even with their sternums.

Until you’ve been in often enough to know to ask for a particular tendon or grilled pope’s nose--presuming the chefs even cook those things--the ritual here is to order one of the set menus, either five courses or 10 courses of grilled chicken and innards: loosely packed chicken meatballs, faintly scented with herbs; grilled chicken skin, pliable but just crisp, threaded onto the skewer in accordion pleats; marinated slivers of chicken thigh, grilled like shish kebabs separated from one another by bits of onion. Sometimes, a pre-appetizer of warm, ground chicken salad seems almost to have the texture of a Thai larb, though the Japanese seasoning is considerably gentler.

At Kokekokko, you will inevitably start with something that tastes like the hen equivalent of the seared albacore sashimi so popular at new-wave sushi bars: thick slabs of breast muscle that have the weight, the texture of good tuna sashimi, grilled just until the center begins to get a haze over its pinkness, lemony, with a dab of wasabi on each of the three pieces on the skewer.

Grilled chicken hearts, skewered and served with a smear of hot Chinese mustard, are a little tough in the way a chuck steak can be tough but are intensely chicken-flavored, the way a skirt steak somehow tastes more like beef than any other cut, or even the way Peruvian chefs manage to make grilled heart taste better than any other part of the cow. Tiny grilled hard-boiled eggs could be the unborn chicken eggs beloved of Yiddish-speaking grandmothers, though they are suspiciously similar to quail eggs.

Where you’d expect the bracingly pungent bowl of miso soup in the middle of a sushi meal, Kokekokko serves a bowl of clear, double-strength chicken consomme, flecked with a few bits of scallion top, which for all its elegance tastes like something straight out of Nate n’ Al’s.

Wisps of chicken breast stretched around okra and Japanese chile have the bite of hot chile, crunch and green flavor of okra and, only lastly, a smidgen of residual sliminess that works to intensify the texture of the chicken. Other wisps are wrapped around chunks of Japanese eggplant or firm, almost sweet slabs of grilled zucchini. The last course is usually crunchy grilled chicken wings, that part of chicken wings other than drummettes, anyway, neatly threaded on skewers and almost too hot to eat.

But come early: When the kitchen runs out of livers and gizzards, which it always does, you will become bored when the chefs begin to repeat themselves halfway through the 10-course dinner, no matter how carefully executed the cooking, how fresh the meat. At a certain point, no matter how much of a connoisseur you may fancy yourself to be, one piece of grilled chicken becomes very much like another.

(BEGIN TEXT OF INFOBOX / INFOGRAPHIC)

WHERE YO GO

Kokekokko, 360 E. 2nd St., Los Angeles, (213) 687-0690. Open for dinner, Mon.-Sat. Beer and wine. Street parking. American Express, MasterCard and Visa accepted. Dinner for two, food only, $30-$50.

WHAT TO GET

Set course dinner.