Tokyo has no shortage of yakitori restaurants. They range from funky, smoky hole-in-the-wall grills to elegant emporia serving prime skewers of the finest fowl. But there's nowhere quite like Torikado.

At the bottom of an anonymous flight of stairs, you push through a heavy wooden door into a room with a spacious open kitchen in the center, a counter of scrubbed white cedar running along three sides. The rest is in shadow, as soot-black as the curtains that cover the rear wall.

There are no windows, but at intervals staffers enter from a second kitchen hidden in the back. Clad in white tunics and with hachimaki towels across their brows, they appear bearing drinks or dishes before retreating from sight. You could be sitting in on a kabuki drama.