EEL À LA TAJIMIENNE
A visit to Uoseki — a Japanese eel restaurant in Tajimi
This is a digest of the original article on discovertajimi.com.
Map and contact information for Tajimi Eel restaurants here.
If you have the slightest interest in food and plan to visit Tajimi in Gifu Prefecture, Japan, a visit to an unagiya — an eel restaurant — is a must. The main attraction of eel Tajimi style its crispiness, something which is achieved by intense broiling.
The main attraction of eel Tajimi style is its crispiness.
More and more foreigners are discovering that eel is a crown jewel of the local food tradition in Tajimi.
“In a way, it is a mixed blessing for me,” says Mr Hiroyuki Murate, chef and owner of the Uoseki restaurant in Tajimi, “because I don’t speak foreign languages. Still, we are delighted to see a quickly growing number of foreign customers. Some come in groups; some are lone travelers, many from Taiwan. Many of them come travelling alone, and many are female. They must have read about us on some blog on the Net.”
We are delighted to see a quickly growing number of foreign customers.
What about local customers, then? Eel has been an important part of their diet for centuries — something that is closely related to its industry. Tajimi has a millennia old pottery tradition, and the hills surrounding the city are filled with kilns, many of them ancient ruins. Local people here will tell you that workers at the kilns have always liked to eat eel to stay healthy. They were hard laborers and preferred food with high energy content.
While Tajimi is surrounded by kilns, the centre of the city has a long pottery and porcelain trading tradition. Businessmen liked to invite their customers to an unagi lunch, because one can finish the meal quickly, and that suits the businesslike spirit of the traditional Tajimi eel restaurant customer. Traders preferred to dine their clients without having to spend too much time or money. This is also why they liked to order donburi — eel fillets on top of rice in a round bowl. You can eat faster with chopsticks if the food is in a bowl, unlike unajū, which is served in an exclusive lacquer jubako — a square “bento box".
While Uoseki and the other eel restaurants around Tajimi are popular today, Mr Murate can testify that the dish was in great demand long before the present boom.
“When we kept a stock of eel in cages in the Toki river here my grandfather had to stand watch, guarding them against thieves. When there were heavy rains and flooding the eel would escape from their cages. At those times people would come to try to steal them from us. These days we exclusively use farmed eel, however. There are no eel fishers here anymore. It’s not possible to make a living from eel fishing any longer.”
His story reminds me of a tale my wife’s grandmother used to recount. Her father was an artisan specializing in the firing of pottery — work that takes a heavy toll on the body. Trusting in the invigorating power of the eel he always kept a stock in cages in a watercourse near the house, which was regularly replenished by a fish monger. Perhaps some of the fish monger’s eel were escapees from the Murate cages, who knows?
Eel as a culinary tradition
There are two main eel cooking traditions in Japan, one in the West (Kansai) and one in the East (Kanto). The main difference is that the Kansai style involves intense broiling to reduce the fat and water content of the eel. In the Kanto region, the eel is both broiled and steamed. While privately owned restaurants in Tajimi follow tradition and cook the eel Kansai style, chain restaurants these days may also have the Kanto variety on their menu.
These cooking methods have evolved over centuries. The oldest know eel recipes in Japan date back to AD 1300, and illustrate how radically different the cooking methods were in those days. The present cooking method of slicing the eel open and adding a sauce were invented in the 18th century.
Because of the fat in the eel cooks developed a special type of thick and sweetened soy sauce based four ingredients — soy sauce, mirin, sugar, and sake. Kabayaki is one popular way of grilling eel and other seafood, a preparation where the fish is split, gutted and boned, butterflied, cut into square fillets, skewered, and dipped in the soy sauce before being broiled.
So what is Mr Murate’s recommendation for the visitor to his restaurant? “Undadon — eel fillets on rice in a bowl — presents a great harmony between the eel, the rice and the tare,” he says.
There is much more to learn, come to our site and explore this and many other aspects of a Japanese countryside town seen through the eyes of a foreign resident.
Hans Karlsson is a resident of Japan since 1989 and fluent in the language and culture. He has been working as a radio journalist, guide, researcher, and translator. He is currently involved in city promotion for Tajimi city. He builds experiences in VR, both cinematic and computer graphics based, to let people experience Japan from the comfort of their homes.
Watch the full movie here. Read the full, original article on discovertajimi.com. There you will also find a large and growing collection of essays on life in Tajimi as seen by a foreigner, as well as VR material, travel tips and information.
