Since receiving a yakitori grill for my birthday last December, I’ve been more popular than I’ve ever been in my life, even including my time in high school driving a Honda Odyssey that could seat eight wild teenagers. As it turns out, a yakitori grill is a magnet for dinner parties: There’s an interactive quality to a yakitori party that other backyard grills can’t match. Instead of having a solo chef in a “kiss the chef” apron, everyone can join in, bringing their favorite proteins, veggies, rice cakes, and even hot dogs. Who wouldn’t want to live out their night market fantasies and eat caramelized pork or chewy fish cakes on skewers?
Although I only got my grill in December, I’ve used it practically every season. Luckily, it’s still possible to host an outdoor dinner party in Southern California during the winter—when it gets too cold in the desert landscape, the grill can double as a space heater. And in the summer, nothing goes better with an ice-cold beer than chicken thigh skewers with umeboshi paste or asparagus roasted over hot coals.
The benefits of a yakitori grill go beyond social capital. First of all, its slim shape makes it much easier to store than massive grills or clunky, awkward hamburger grills. The extra shelf in the legs is ideal for storing skewers, sauces, silicone grill brushes, and other cooking utensils, so if space is an issue in your home, this is the grill for you.
Plus, the grill net is easy to remove to dump the hot coals in. The extra space under the net where the coals burn also serves as extra space to cook foil-wrapped sweet potatoes until they’re soft and creamy, helping you get the most out of your grilling.
Cleaning is also relatively easy. Since the grill net is so easy to remove, you can take it into the kitchen to be scrubbed (sometimes I just hose it down in the backyard). The body of the grill, where the coals are stored, also has holes that catch the inevitable ash. When all the coals have turned to gray dust, all you have to do is remove the steel divider that separates the coal from the ash and dump out the ash. Although this is not a feature of the grill, the ash has done wonders for my roses.
Before Yakitori Grill, dinner parties or get-togethers only happened when I initiated them. Now friends text me and ask when I’ll be doing the next Yakitori get-together. And because Yakitori Grill is so much fun for everyone involved, I always oblige.
