Whenever I thought I was going to eat something “normal” in Japan, there was always some kind of twist…

After a grueling day of temple-touring, Mr Rabbit’s Japanese Cousin (MRJC) arranged for us to have dinner at Imahan, a very swishy sukiyaki restaurant in Shinjuku. Sukiyaki is a Japanese specialty. It is cooked tableside in a special skillet, making it an interactive dinner rather like fondue. The skillet is filled with a mixture of sake, soy sauce and sugar. The meat, typically thinly sliced marbled cuts of wagyu beef (and the reason why sukiyaki is so wonderful) is cooked in said pot along with some noodles and/or tofu and veg.

The Shinjuku Imahan (www.imahan.com) is one several Tokyo outposts — but it would be wrong to think of it as a restaurant chain on the North American model. The Japanese “rule of specialization” (see Rabbit’s “Noodles, noodles, noodles!” post) demands that learning to prepare any particular type of food in Japan becomes an almost lifelong apprenticeship… recall that their chefs are literally called Masters. But the apprenticeship model also means that sometimes several of the children in a family will each learn the same culinary art so that when it comes time to hand down the family business/recipes it may happen that more than one of the offspring ends up opening his (and it usually is his) own outpost of the resto. So the Imahan restaurants are, if I understand correctly, all owned by various branches of the family and use the traditional recipes, but they are not franchises or chains. The Yabu Soba we visited in Ueno is similarly one of several Yabu Sobas owned by various offspring of some original Master.

Either way, the Imahan in Shinkuju is very upscale and quite Western in appearance. We were seated in our own private private room with glassed-in doors and a wooden booth — a rather zen aesthetic that I expect is a modern interpretation of a tatami room. The service here was excellent, and we enjoyed a constant rotation of fresh hot towels. (One other quirk of Japanese dining — nobody brings linen napkins or even paper serviettes. Rather, you receive a hot towel at the beginning of the meal and you kind of set it beside yourself and dab your fingers from time to time. There’s nothing to mitigate the dangers of spilling in your lap.)

The Western wine was actually flowing at this bar, but we were still in “ONLY JAPANESE FOOD”mode, so we went with beer (which the Japanese drink with nearly every meal).* The first course was a beautifully presented tray of four baby dishes: some seaweed, which I found slimy and rather unpleasant, a shellfish that I could not eat, a little mound of cold spinach which was quite good, and something else that neither of us can remember.

Next, we had a sashimi course, four varieties, all very fresh and tasty.

Finally, they brought on the beef. But this being Japan, everything indeed has a twist, so our first experience of wagu presented itself as beef sushi. The lovely, fatty flesh was served raw with a bit of wasabi. After all the other weird things I’d been consuming, this really didn’t faze me. It was wonderful, chewy and sweet, and it went down easy, leaving me very much looking forward to the main event.

A server brought out our sukiyaki pot along with more meat, veg, and noodles. She poured the sake/soy/sugar broth into the skillet and then began stirring in the heavily marbled beef, which immediately coiled into succulent strips. Now came the weird part. Prior to offering us the tasty morsels, the server presented each with a small bown of a freshly whisked raw egg into which we were instructed to dip said beef. North Americans tend to have a mortal fear of raw eggs, but Rabbit did the dipping thing and the beef and egg mixture was divine. Along with the beef we ate onions, two kinds of tofu, some parsley-like green veg, and some noodles —all cooked on the hotplate and presented to be dipped in the raw egg. Delicious.

The sukiyaki course was followed by traditional rice, pickles, and miso.

Dessert was a small dish of fruit —apple, and another orange fruit we didn’t know. Also, there was a small scoop of plum sorbet. Mr. Rabbit and I couldn’t identify the plum flavour, but the JC knew it immediately. It’s interesting how some flavours are so indiscernible to certain palates while so immediately clear to others. Either way, this was a nice light finish to an excellent meal.

* Note that wine is one of the only things that the Rabbitz actually could not do without for the duration of our trip. The “only Japanese foods in Japan” rule breaks down when the Yakitori post finds us guzzling champagne and Rhone at the Rabat Wine Bar.

Posted on November 30th, 2007 by rabbit
Filed under: Japan, Restaurant Reviews