Blog

May 05, 2024

Tables for Two: Ganso Yaki

By Silvia Killingsworth One of the least helpful words to describe a restaurant in Brooklyn is “casual”; it indicates that you can dress however you like, but says nothing about how much you’ll spend

By Silvia Killingsworth

One of the least helpful words to describe a restaurant in Brooklyn is “casual”; it indicates that you can dress however you like, but says nothing about how much you’ll spend or what to expect from the food. Brooklyn’s Ganso Yaki is a self-described casual restaurant, akin to an izakaya, serving drinks and snacks, like yakitori—skewers of grilled poultry, usually chicken. An outcropping of very cheap, very dingy izakayas in the East Village is popular with N.Y.U. students (some are more lax about carding than others), but this is Boerum Hill, not St. Mark’s Place: the T-shirted patrons are two decades out of school and willing to pay more than a couple dollars per skewer. Prices are tweaked accordingly: edamame is six dollars instead of, say, four, because it is a premium variety of black soybean, slightly sweeter and larger than ordinary edamame, and comes dusted in sea salt imported from Japan. Ganso Yaki has the same blond-wood booths as its sister shop, Ganso Ramen, a few blocks away, but it’s more serene and airy: this is upscale casual.

A typical Japanese meal begins with small, delicate boiled and seasoned dishes served cold. On a recent evening, hijiki, a black seaweed, was nutty and tender, and ohitashi, spinach steeped in dashi broth topped with flakes of bonito—dried, fermented skipjack tuna—came perfectly blanched. Hiyayakko, chilled tofu, was too firm to qualify as silken, and was saved from the brink of flavorlessness by ribbons of red onion, shiso, ginger, and more bonito. Of the hot street-food snacks, fried dark-meat chicken was juicy, but the batter was lacking in both crispness and flavor. A waiter recommended dressing the boneless nuggets in a house-made yuzu-chili oil; would that the kitchen had already taken the liberty. Another night, a party of three could barely finish half an okonomiyaki, a traditional thick egg-and-cabbage pancake punctuated with cubes of pork belly. Though it looked just right, topped with a lattice of Kewpie mayonnaise and sweet brown sauce, there was far too much of the latter to keep going after a few bites.

There are standouts, like tempura of kabocha squash, creamy as avocado, and a paddle of shiso, whole and flat like a beautiful leaf pressing. A skewer of chicken-leg meat was tender and thrillingly fatty, and the tsukune, perfectly spiced minced chicken, was the meat log you never knew you craved. These are elevated executions of skewer food—a category so ubiquitous in Japan it has its own emoji. Here the boutique bamboo-speared bites begin at nine dollars apiece, and the bill adds up, slowly but casually. ♦

Open daily for dinner. Dishes $5-$18.