Grilled Chicken for the Ages at Kokekokko

There’s an old saying about resourceful cooks using every portion of a pig but the squeal. Well, even the “squeal”--or in this case, the “cluck”--is used at Kokekokko.

This Little Tokyo eating place specializes in grilled chicken--the Japanese call it yakitori --and makes amazingly thorough use of the bird.

Livers, gizzards, leg meat, breast meat and skin--you get them all in a series of snack-like courses. The parts of the chicken that don’t appear on the plate no doubt are tossed into the pot to make the broth that accompanies the meal.

It’s a lively place with a woodsy log cabin look and is open only at night, much like the street stalls of Tokyo that dispense yakitori after dark. The atmosphere is as jovial and noisy as a sushi bar--probably noisier due to the sizzle and hiss emanating from the grill.

Most of the customers crowd around the counter, and the food is prepared and served a morsel at a time, like sushi. Almost everything is speared on wooden sticks and grilled over charcoal. Exceptions include sauteed chicken bits spooned over rice and chicken sashimi.

You can order either a half-course of yakitori (five sticks) or a full-course (10 sticks), and if you are obviously unacquainted with yakitori customs, the cooks will ask how you like your meat (medium rare, well done) and check whether you eat livers and gizzards.

I skipped the innards and selected medium rare on the cook’s advice.

First came a little cup containing crisp sweet green beans seasoned with sesame, soy sauce and sugar. The meal proper started with breast meat chunks lightly daubed with wasabi. Next, I had chicken meat wrapped around eggplant slices while a friend went for grilled livers that were perfectly cooked--rare and tender inside, crisp outside. Then we tried skewers of chicken with green onions, chicken meatballs, salted chicken leg meat, leg meat with yakitori sauce, gizzards, grilled chicken skins and chicken wings. Toward the middle, we received a skewer of hard-boiled quail eggs, a green salad and broth.

Yakitori sauce, which tastes much like teriyaki sauce, is the restaurant’s own blend of seasonings and crucial to the reputation of its food. And Kokekokko’s sauce is a good one.

After consuming our 10 sticks, we ordered some of the dishes we saw prepared for other customers. Plump fresh shiitake mushrooms made a nice contrast to the long parade of meat. And then we tried two forms of chicken sashimi. First came the breast meat, shaved thin and wrapped around fine strands of the white part of green onion. The soy sauce-based dip that accompanied this included a raw quail egg. Next, the cook took out chicken leg meat that had been wrapped with the skin into a roll and frozen so that when sliced it looked like sausage. A few moments on the plate, however, and it thawed into a shapeless mass. Chopped green onion flavored its salty dipping sauce.

We also tried the house special rice, which was topped with finely diced chicken seasoned with soy sauce, sugar and thin strips of nori (dried seaweed). We finished with big mugs of green tea. By then it was around 8 on a Monday night, and the restaurant was so crowded that standees filled the doorway.

Kokekokko Yakitori House, 203 S. Central Ave., Los Angeles. (213) 687-0690. Open Monday through Saturday 5:30 p.m. to midnight. MasterCard, Visa and Japan Credit Bureaucards accepted. Park on the street or in neighborhood lots. The full-course, 10-stick yakitori dinner is $18.50. The five-stick half-course is $11.