Ganso Yaki

One of the least helpful words to describe a restaurant in Brooklyn is “casual”; it indicates that you can dress however you like, but says nothing about how much you’ll spend or what to expect from the food. Brooklyn’s Ganso Yaki is a self-described casual restaurant, akin to an izakaya, serving drinks and snacks, like yakitori—skewers of grilled poultry, usually chicken. An outcropping of very cheap, very dingy izakayas in the East Village is popular with N.Y.U. students (some are more lax about carding than others), but this is Boerum Hill, not St. Mark’s Place: the T-shirted patrons are two decades out of school and willing to pay more than a couple dollars per skewer. Prices are tweaked accordingly: edamame is six dollars instead of, say, four, because it is a premium variety of black soybean, slightly sweeter and larger than ordinary edamame, and comes dusted in sea salt imported from Japan. Ganso Yaki has the same blond-wood booths as its sister shop, Ganso Ramen, a few blocks away, but it’s more serene and airy: this is upscale casual.