Sumire Yakitori House......the good, the edible and the forgettable

The Good

This is not tea. It's chicken soup. Very good chicken soup. A small pot serves approximately two cups. Even if you were an enemy to yakitori and would eat nothing of grilled meats on sticks and their ilk, try this soup. 

That's the chicken shoulder, shio. It's quite nice. I can't specifically point out how it tastes like, but I think it's pretty good.

The Edible

The piping hot tamagoyaki mentai cheese was what it was. I could imagine how it would taste and it was pretty much that. What I didn't expect was that it was rather large. I'm not complaining.

Pretty competent if unexceptional tori hatsu (chicken hearts). Did a better job than Ippudo.

Tsukune (chicken meatball) was again, decent if unexceptional. I tried to like these, but ended up feeling that they were just okay.

If I remember right, the kawa (chicken skin) was another okay, not impressively so item. We had a pretty good sensing of the food quality here at this point.

Grilled nasu (eggplant) with minced chicken and cheese. I didn't dislike this at all, but it looked really clean for an izakaya styled food item. The look of the melted cheese made me think of plastic. No they didn't taste anything like plastic. 

The Forgettable

Too much mayo and that tonkatsu sauce flavour which I never liked in this bakudan korokke (croquette bomb?). The taste was rich, mayo-ey and greasy. And not in a way that was enjoyable for me. Pity because this was a good idea.

These were some of the more poorly done tebasaki I've had in a while. Even the a la carte buffet styled grill at Shinryoku tasted better. Whatever little meat there was in those wings, were dry and hard. 

I like mentaiko stuff. The mentai mayo topping didn't save these boring chicken breast.

As much as I understand that izakaya food is generally salted to make one drink more, the ume paste that they squeezed over was way too salty even over chunky bland chicken breast. Unpleasantly salty.

I'm not too impressed, but I guess this joint ( 80 Middle Road #01-88/89, tel: +65 6338 9963) has enough that we could give them a second go since there may be other things that we didn't get a chance at that might be good. If not, I could always return just for the chicken soup.