Torikizoku Keonjikitaguchi-branch

One of my favorite izakaya !! So cheap chicken and drinks! My favorite is Yuzu Hachimitsu sour! So delicious! The karage is very good too! Lots of yakitori to choose from. It’s pretty much only chicken so if you don’t eat chicken I wouldn’t recommend it at all! Everything I’ve tried here is pretty good though! It’s so affordable and a really fun restaurant to go to! I recommend it!

Tokrikizoku is a chain of yakatokori and drinking izakayas that cater to the typical late night crowd. Like most izakaya in Japan; they are smokey, loud, and are open late. That is all part of the charm.
For us lamo foreigners, we do not know what is a chain izakaya and what is local, once we run into a place that looks appealing and is open. So, we went to Torikizoku versus a more mom and pop type place without even knowing it. In a neighborhood like Koenji, there are hundreds of izakaya… but, Torikizoku was also very crowded, a good sign.
The craze right now that I am always interested in partaking in is drinking «highball» drinks. Which are a frosty mug of whisky mixed with various mixers, my favorite mixer being Calpis— I ordered that here. Calpis is a milky soda drink that reminds me of a citrusy carbonated yogurt (yakult) drink. Love it.
There are two flavors of yakitori available— salted or sauced. We ordered all of the typical skewers of meat like chicken and beef, chicken skin, tskune (chicken meatball), and lastly chicken breast cartilage. The cartilage was the only thing that we had difficulty eating because of the hardness of it. The best items being sauced tskune, salted chicken with green onion, and crispy chicken skin.
The menu at Torikizoku is very limited to mostly meat items. We found very little vegetables, so we just ordered a side of spicy cucumber salad, which is all we could find.