Ask a daring diner for his/her top ten list of riskiest dishes, and you’re likely to hear about the joys and dangers of raw nettle leaves, blowfish meat (fugu), freshly foraged wild mushrooms, and the benign-sounding but potentially deadly chicken. Raw chicken, to be specific–because in the wrong hands, it’s a potential killer. Uncooked poultry is also the reason these selfsame gustatory thrill seekers know about Yakitori Totto, an ultra-authentic Japanese grill restaurant in Midtown West. But the famous chicken sashimi, served here with a hygienic precision that might make an internist self-conscious, is, quite honestly, a distraction from the rest of the menu. Ignore it and just think of Yakitori Totto as a traditional Japanese grill, one whose paper screens, long lacquered dining bar, and nearly completely Japanese clientele lend it a transportative charm that might just make you forget that you’re on the second floor of a Manhattan walkup. But focus, because we’re ready to commit this to writing: Yakitori Totto is the best grill restaurant in town.

I’d call it an izakaya, but Totto is more refined than most izakayas in the city–most notably, there’s no incipient sense that everyone who walks in the door will leave the restaurant so trolleyed that they can barely stand. Instead, from the instant you see how Totto’s patrons watch the grill masters at work, you get the feeling that everyone is aware that too much sake or beer might dull the tastebuds, and so they carefully maintain enough sobriety to really enjoy their food. It is impossible to find fault with this attitude when virtually everything the restaurant serves is delicious. Chopper, HungryMan and I stopped in to eat dinner, take some photos and sample a few skewers, but instead wound up spreading our Totto experience over two days of noshing and 20 different dishes. On our first visit (when we took pictures of what we ate), we ordered 18 small plates, two shochu drinks and one order of Harushika (junmai) sake and sat in amazement when we saw that our bill came to only $93. At about $40 a head after adding a tip, a meal at Totto might just be the culinary bargain of the year– and it’s only mid-January.

As much as we’d love to write about each of the twenty items we ate over the course of two visits, we’ve created a Flickr photostream of the meal and took the editorial liberty of focusing on a few of the biggest highlights of our meal here, even though we do believe that every one of the dishes (except perhaps the slightly dry asparagus skewer) deserves a paragraph of its own.

Two of our very favorite items, the grilled eggplant rounds and the seaweed salad (both pictured above) put to rest any concerns we might have had about bringing a vegetarian to Yakitori Totto– these dishes were not only meatless, they were superb. The eggplant slices were delicately soft and savory, slathered on their tops with a sweet ponzu sauce and a few sprinkled sesame seeds. Our Kaiso seaweed salad was also a sweet-savory combination, but in this case, three different types of briny seaweed were marinated in a mirin-umeboshi (Japanese salted plum) dressing with thin slivers of onion and half-moons of cucumber. I have rarely experienced such a complex flavor profile in a salad, and never before in one with seaweed as its primary ingredient, but now I can’t stop thinking about it.

We ate the seaweed salad as a sort of palate cleanser to prepare us to make the transition from tofu skewers and tofu salad into the realm of the chicken–Yakitori Totto’s claim to fame. Both HungryMan and Chopper agreed that the chicken meatball, a skewer made of ground white chicken meat was the best of the chicken dishes, with or without the side order of a raw quail egg for dipping. But HungryMan, in particular, also fell in love with the marinated chicken liver skewer as well as the crispy fried chicken skin skewer. As he ate the liver, he rolled his head back and compared it to “a sweet, smoky foie gras.” On most of our grilled dishes–the chicken livers included– we opted for a ponzu sauce marinade, but diners can also choose a simple Okinawan sea salt seasoning, which is absolutely just as good, if much simpler-tasting.

My own favorite dish at Yakitori Totto is not a grilled item, but an unusual chimera that crosses a salad, a gumbo, and a seafood stew. Nebaneba is a thick, soup-like concoction made of fresh, crisp chopped okra, sliced sticky seaweed, Japanese yam, miniature sardines, and soy sauce–and it’s served ice-cold. It is like nothing I have ever tasted in my life, with flavors and textures that reminded me alternately of gazpacho and bouillabaisse, then tomatillo salsa and cucumber soup. Chicken sashimi might get all the attention, but nebaneba is the real Jennifer Hudson here.

That’s not to say that the other dishes we ate weren’t similarly fantastic–I don’t think we’ve eaten a meal this consistently good in the past six months. And to help you get a better sense of how true this is, you may want to pay a visit to our Yakitori Totto Flickr photostream.

One quick word of warning: there seems to be a prankster at Totto, one who likes to flip the sign on the front door to read ‘Closed,’ when the restaurant is quite definitely open, as he/she has done on each of the last three times we’ve visited. Maybe, despite the little bowls of salt on either side of the staircase, there’s a mischievous poltergeist in the vestibule– one who wants to horde the ponzu-dipped chicken breast skewers for himself. But ignore the sign and try the door–the food is too phenomenal to let a thing like a little shenanigan keep you away.

Yakitori Totto, 251 West 55th Street (between 7th and 8th Avenues), 212-245-4555.