Yakitori as a full-course cuisine was pioneered here. Isehiro began in 1921 as a poultry shop whose founder's wife started grilling skewers for regulars at a four-seat counter; a century later the third generation of the Hoshino family butchers whole hens each morning and serves them as a twelve-act progression — sasami with wasabi, livers in a tare unbroken since the postwar reopening, gizzard, the house's invented negimaki leg-meat scrolls, a meatball bound by nothing but skill (each within two grams of the last), and a closing chicken broth. The family says it has not changed a supplier in a hundred years.
The Noren View
Tokyo's famous yakitori counters make you fight a phone lottery for a ¥20,000 seat. Isehiro gives you the origin of the form — grilled over binchōtan in a building engineered around its own smoke — for half that, two blocks from your shinkansen platform. It is the best first-night dinner in this collection.
Why you can't book it
No platforms, no English page — a telephone, in Japanese, answered by a house that has never needed anything else. Lunch (the famous grilled chicken donburi) takes no bookings at all; the queue starts before noon.
Who should go
Arrivals and departures — it is almost unfairly close to Tokyo Station — museum-goers leaving the Artizon, and anyone who wants to understand yakitori as cuisine rather than bar snack, told in order, from one bird.