A whole chicken thigh or breast, fried in one piece. Not cut up first, not cut up after. It is marinated in a soy sauce base with garlic worked into it, dusted with potato starch, and deep-fried, and in Matsumoto the tradition holds that ginger has to go into the marinade as well.

It arrives on the plate as a single slab of chicken with nothing else on it, and cutting it up is left to whoever is eating.

There are competing accounts of the name. One is a pun: bandits, sanzoku, take things from people, and the verb for taking, toriageru, contains the sounds of tori ageru, frying a chicken. The other says there was a shop called Sanzoku in Shiojiri where the whole thing began.

The odder question is why a deep-fried dish is called yaki, grilled. The explanation given is that oil used to be expensive, so it was originally cooked in a small quantity of it, closer to frying in a pan than submerging. Some shops now call it sanzoku-age instead, which is accurate and sounds wrong. It belongs to the Chushin district, around Matsumoto and Shiojiri, and it is what a great many people here order without thinking about it. The name remembers a method that is no longer used.