Yamachan
Sakai Miyati Youth Bldg. 2F/3F, Nagoya, Japan
Web: Yamachan
Phone: 052-971-2276
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Beer Chains Chicken Wings Drinks Japanese Nagoya Wings

"Yamachan serves its wings with ends intact - no drumsticks - an actually includes a five-step instructional guide on its menu to help new patrons learn to snap and eat them."

Nagoya is Japan's fourth-largest city, and though one mightn't guess as much from its staid streets, it's obsessed with miso. Known best for its role in the common Japanese soup, miso paste - actually, pastes - are made from fermented soybeans and malted barley or rice. Since Nagoyans like their sauces strong, and miso paste is commonly strong and salty, it's not a surprise that they've found a way to put miso or its cousin soy sauce in just about everything. At Yamachan (officially Sekai No Yamachan, or "cute mountain of the world"), a hugely popular Nagoya-based chicken wing and bar food chain that conspicuously marks its locations with the weird cartoony visage of a guy in a bird suit, even the restaurants' famed chicken wings can't escape fully from the soy treatment, and even then, there's a bottle of the sauce on every table should someone decide they need more.

For us, the temptation was never there: Yamachan serves so many different types of miso dishes that we couldn't even contemplate adding even one more drop of the flavor to our meal. We started, for instance, with the Nagoya Aka Miso Lager, a red and gold-labeled bottle of distinctively red and uniquely red miso-flavored beer - much better tasting and thankfully less overpowering than many of the novelty beers we've tried in the United States. It's easy to order a new and interesting-sounding beer and never have a desire to try it again; if not for the 690 yen ($7.75) asking price, we would easily have ordered more.

The red miso continued with two other dishes: five sticks of Miso Kushi Katsu (400 yen), deep-fried, battered pork kushiage in a red miso sauce, which unlike the traditionally dark brown, thickened soy-like miso had a slightly lighter and less salty taste - akin to eating fried pork with an almost tomato-tinged soy sauce. One of us liked this dish and the other found it to be "off," opining that miso and deep-fried meats are less than ideally combined - a distinctly non-Nagoyan perspective, but one that isn't hard for outsiders to argue. Akadashi (180 yen), a bowl of red miso soup, was served Nagoya-style at a literally boiling temperature, the miso particles stirring by themselves into tormented clouds topped by thin-sliced, fresh scallions. Too hot to eat as served, and offered without a spoon - tilting the bowl to your mouth and sipping is allowed in polite Japanese society - the soup was plain other than its temperature, not quite as rich in depth as we've had it elsewhere while packing only a single piece of seaweed in its bottom, though it was inexpensive enough that we didn't mind.

Another Nagoyan miso variant, Nagoya No Misotonkatsu (aka Misokatsu for short, 630 yen) is the city's take on the incredibly popular tonkatsu deep-fried pork cutlet and rice dish served plain or with curry elsewhere in Japan. At Yamachan, the cutlet of meat was predictable apart from its overly fine breading, which lost some of the textural fun of the coarse panko used at other establishments, but the thick, classically brown miso sauce poured on half of the cutlet was new - a salty, seemingly unsugared alternative to the slightly sweet and otherwise similar-looking tonkatsu sauce offered optionally with most tonkatsu dishes. A single bite was enough for one of us to stop eating, again pointing to the miso as a less than ideal complement to the deep-fried meat; the other finished the plate but didn't think much of it. There are reasons why some dishes stay regional, and misokatsu's overly salty flavor would be at the top of our list of guesses.

What actually brought us to Yamachan, however, was something totally different: the chicken wings. Yamachan and rival chain Furaibo are known as masters of the Nagoya-style chicken wing - here called Tebasaki or Maboroshino Tebasaki - a somewhat different alternative to the special recipe served at Tori No Mai; the wings are so famous at these chains that they're up front on the menu, offered in sets of five for 400 yen. It has been said that Yamachan's 30-plus locations in the Nagoya area are extremely consistent relative to Furaibo's, which rarely serve better food, and more frequently serve worse. (Notably, however, Furaibo has opened locations in the United States; Yamachan has not.) All of these places serve their wings with ends intact - no drumsticks - and as shown in our first photo above, Yamachan actually includes a five-step instructional guide on its menu to help new patrons learn to snap off the ends and strip meat off the wings with one good yank of the teeth. Yamachan's wings are soy- and sugar-marinaded, salted, peppered and double-fried for a result that's not quite up to Korean standards of delicacy, but certainly crispier than the typical Buffalo-style wing, and thanks to the copious dry pepper, reasonably powerful even in their default "spicy" flavor.

Our opinions were slightly split on the Yamachan wings. While we both liked them, one of us thought they were a little less impressive than the Tori No Mai version, while the other would have called them roughly equivalent - the kick of what seemed to be dry red and white pepper invited comparisons to Buffalo's more famous wet red peppered wings without mimicking their style, yet another way that Western New York restauranteurs could experiment with the classic recipe to positive effect. Unfortunately, though we'd tried to order a second flavor, our server forgot to bring them - one of a few unimpressive aspects to the Yamachan experience, including having to walk up two flights of stairs and then finding the most seemingly disinterested staff we've encountered at any restaurant of any sort on this trip. If we were to go again, we'd visit a different location.

The last item we tried was one that would be a hit anywhere if people didn't realize what it was: the Torikawa Gyoza Teppan (420 yen for five) was a plate of iron skillet-fried, scallion ring-topped Chinese-style chicken dumplings with a distinctly Japanese twist, the use of chicken skin as the wrapper. If you can imagine a chicken wing hollowed out, bone removed, and then stuffed with tender but ground chicken breast meat, you'll have the general idea, topped of course with a light brown soy-hinted sauce. Both of us would order this dish again any day; it may actually be for the best, health-wise, that it's not available closer to home.

Although we'd generally enjoyed most of the meal at Yamachan and would have gladly found a way to try some more of the wings had they arrived, all the miso and the less than fully satisfying service led us to pass on desserts such as the Aka-Miso Pudding - yup, that would be red miso mixed with custard. We still had two flights of stairs to walk down just to leave the place, and preferred to traverse them while we were still capable of standing. If nothing else, Yamachan was memorable enough to consider visiting again in the future; a less one-track-minded survey of its menu, which largely but not entirely consists of fried dishes, would be our recommendation to those who follow.