Tokyo Restaurant Encases Yakitori In Cold Gelatin For Summer

Seasoned skewers of grilled chicken are excellent things to eat during the summer, but they aren't exactly cool and refreshing. To rectify that situation, one Tokyo yakitori restaurant has invented a new kind of summer dish by encasing its traditional grilled meat skewers in blocks of cold gelatin to create a summer yakitori that is cold and moist, if a bit unusual looking.

The gelatin reportedly ensures that the summer yakitori remain exceptionally moist, because any juice that would run out of the meat is retained in the gelatin. That structure theoretically preserves all the flavor of the yakitori, even if the end product looks like a cold chicken popsicle.

According to RocketNews24, the "cool yakitori" are the creation of the Zenyaren yakitori restaurant in Tokyo's financial district. A two-skewer order of cool yakitori runs 380 yen, or about $3.75, and includes one skewer each of chicken meatballs and pork cheek yakitori, each encased in a large block of cold, collagen gelatin. Zenyaren is limiting its cool yakitori sales to 20 plates a day.