For various reasons, I've been doing a lot of my restaurant eating in Astoria recently (great food area, by the way - the number of honey soaked semolina cakes I've eaten recently borders on the grotesque), but I also recently dined with a friend of mine at Yakitori Totto, a restaurant on West 55th Street near 8th Avenue. I'd long been meaning to visit the place, having heard wonderful things, and having a particularly carnivorous friend along gave me a perfect excuse. Carnivorous, because Yakitori Totto is known for serving the parts of chicken one does not imagine are reasonable to eat - soft knee bone, and heart, and gizzard. It is not a place for the unreasonably squeamish.

The casual-catch up on old times dinner with one friend is honestly the stock in trade of yakitori totto - the small, cramped restaurant is no place for large groups, and the best seats in the house are at the counter in front of the barbecue. But one wishes larger groups had a place here, because the food, though strange, is both gratifyingly simple and excellent. Chicken heart is nothing more exotic than a particularly rich bit of chicken, like the "oyster" at the back of the leg that alone makes roasting a whole chicken a worthwhile exercise. And though the knee bone was out of stock, the selection of salts and spices made even my skewer of chicken thigh an interesting tidbit. Roasted hot nuts are also on offer, and make for an excellent accompaniment to the cold Japanese beer that seemed to flow freely from table to table.

Grazing menus are ever more popular these days, and I can see why - we weren't particularly hungry, so having the option of polishing off just 4 skewers was wonderful (skewers range from $3-5 each). But if we needed a full meal, I suspect yakitori totto can be deceptively expensive, by the time you add up the exotic appetizers and a couple of glasses of sake. But on the other hand, if the grapefruit drink I saw being prepared at another table was as interesting as it looked, that ordeal might well be worth the effort.