How To Order The Best Thing At Yoshinoya

Edwin Goei

If you read my twice daily ramblings on this blog with any regularity, you'll know that I have an unhealthy affinity with Yoshinoya. Apart from the mystery-meat tacos at Jack in the Box, it is one of the few fast food places that I eat at with any frequency.

A few weeks ago, I realized that Yoshinoya would allow me to ask for extra skin on my chicken bowl.The chicken skin, as I said before, is the reason I prefer Yoshinoya over the increasingly ubiquitous Flame Broiler chain.

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This week, I tested Yoshinoya and asked them to put chicken skin on the beef bowl. To my surprise and possibly the detriment of my heart health, they obliged me.

But then, why wouldn't they?

As I was ordering, I saw that a piece of chicken thigh was being stripped of its precious, chicharron-like skin for another customer who didn't realize that's where all the flavor is. Had it not for my request, it would've just been thrown away.

Instead, the crispy swatches of rendered poultry epidermis now topped my bowl, making the gyu-don even better than it ever could be, and me, perhaps the first person to ask for chicken skin to be added to it.

This may not be the Yoshinoya equivalent to "Animal Style," but if it ever becomes a thing, I'm reserving the right to nickname it the Goei-Style-Gyu-Don.