Hamagurizaka Maekawa

Fire held at the counter

Yoshiteru Maekawa turns Takasaka chicken over binchotan as Executive Chef at Hamagurizaka Maekawa in Kanazawa, keeping the work close to the counter. The gesture is small: a skewer lifted, checked, returned to the heat before the skin loses its tension. Yakitori gives little shelter to a cook. Timing, fat, salt, distance from the coals and the cut of the bird all arrive at once, and Maekawa’s station depends on keeping those pressures legible.

His lineage runs through Torishiki in Meguro, where he trained under Ikegawa-san, and through Torien in New York City, where he ran the kitchen in 2020–2021. At Hamagurizaka Maekawa, opened on December 10, 2020, that background settles into a renovated 100-year-old townhouse at the foot of Saigawa Ohashi Bridge in Nomachi. The restaurant holds a Michelin one star from the 2021 Guide Hokuriku edition, but the craft here is not arranged around the plaque. It is arranged around the pass, the coals and the sequence of skewers moving through Maekawa’s hands.

Takasaka chicken, cut by cut

The program is omakase and counter-led, built around Takasaka chicken and seasonal Kaga vegetables. The course runs approximately 2 hours 20 minutes, long enough for the bird to move from lighter preparations into richer cuts without rushing the fire. Thigh, quail and tsukune anchor the house’s named signatures, while other cited cuts include white liver, chochin, seseri and sunazuri. Each asks for a different tolerance: fat that needs rendering, muscle that needs chew, liver that needs heat without collapse.

Maekawa works with binchotan for smoke and heat rather than spectacle. Salt, sansho, yuzukosho, sesame ponzu, shoyu, fresh wasabi, Tokyo negi and shichimi appear as adjustments, not decoration. The vegetables matter in the same register. Kaga produce enters the course as a local counterweight to the chicken, and the kitchen also sends out pieces such as homemade thick fried tofu. The beverage side stays in service of that rhythm, with sake, shochu and wine supporting the skewers rather than pulling the meal away from the grill.

The machiya around the pass

The room keeps the cooking near. Hamagurizaka Maekawa is set inside a stylish machiya, with local lacquerware and pottery in the field of vision and an 8-seat counter holding the pace of service. Guests remove their shoes at entry, and the shift from street to house changes the register before the first skewer arrives. The room is quiet, dignified and narrow enough that apprentice movement reads as part of the meal.

That movement carries the Torishiki inheritance without turning it into theatre. Calls are quick, hands clear space, skewers return to the pass in order. Kanazawa is often read through seafood and kaiseki; here the discipline is poultry, charcoal and repetition. The house’s next sentence is written each service in the same material: Takasaka Chicken Thigh.