Kanazawa: Yakitori Dinner

For dinner, we walked to Akiyoshi Korinbo Ten (やきとりの名門秋吉 香林坊店) 🗾, a bustling Yakitori restaurant which we had seen near the Samurai district. Our guide told us it was good and would not require a reservation, although a wait was to be expected.

We had to wait, but during that time, we met a young lady from Belgium who was visiting after working in Kanazawa several years ago (her hometown is a sister city of Kanazawa, and she had worked for the Kanazawa municipal government), along with her Japanese friend. We passed the time (about 30 minutes) with conversation (we spoke English, although after mentioning I was Dutch, we did exchange some words in Dutch/Flemish; these two languages sound somewhat different, but mutual understanding is 98% or so).

We enjoyed a great spread (17 individual dishes, four of which were double portions) of various Yakitori, two large bottles of beer, and some tea. The place was loud (as these places tend to be) and smoky (from the grills, not cigarette smoke). All this for ¥ 10,037 ($70, or about $23 per person) including taxes. Japan has an enormous number of restaurants per capita, and its eating-out culture (for relatively simple dinners and lunches) means prices are very reasonable. People do this a lot!

The walk back to the hotel was a reasonable and necessary exercise after all this food. We got back around 9 PM and prepared for the next day’s excursion.