Sumiyaki Kaminari Shintenchi

Thunder and chicken skewers might be strange to think of together, but the association is natural to anyone from Hiroshima. One of the most famous regional names in yakitori, Sumiyaki Kaminari shares its name with the Japanese word for thunder. In Japan, it is believed that a year filled with thunder will lead to a bountiful harvest; the restaurant was thus named in the hope that it would enjoy brisk business, and in turn, delight many guests who pass through its doors. And delight guests it most definitely has. Three major things have regulars coming through its doors over and over again. The first is the quality of its chicken, which are all brand-name broilers from all over Japan. The next is Kaminari’s “tohbi” grilling method. Conventional grilling has the flames come in direct contact with the yakitori, resulting in uneven cooking. Each chef at Kaminari puts some distance between the skewers and the charcoal, ensuring that it is cooked only with the burning charcoal’s infrared rays. This seals in the natural umami with a beautiful crust, and has the added effect of removing excess fat. But Kaminari’s final secret is its sauce. Kaminari’s sauce is thick and rich, made tsugi-tashi style like a perpetual stew: when the existing batch of sauce runs low, instead of making an entirely new one, additional sauce is simply added, mixing in the new flavors with the old. The sauce at Kaminari has been continuously added to for 44 years and counting, resulting in a complex flavor so deep it has to be tasted to be believed. As is expected for a grilling restaurant, the centerpiece is the grill itself. But Kaminari stands apart from other grilling restaurants with the sheer size of its central grill: to facilitate the distant-heat cooking that gives the skewers their characteristic taste, the grill is especially large, a beast with a voracious appetite that consumes easily 15 kilograms of bincho-tan charcoal a day. All three Sumiyaki Kaminari branches are located fairly near each other. As its name suggests, the Shintenchi outlet is right in the middle of the Shintenchi area, Hiroshima’s famously bustling entertainment district. A 20-seat counter affords those lucky enough to secure a spot a front-row view of the action, but a number of table seats accommodate plenty of guests for special occasions as well.