Unagi Kabayaki: Why Tokyo and Osaka Cut the Eel Differently

Unagi is one of the few things in Japanese cooking where the technique is regional enough that you can tell where a cook trained by looking at the finished piece.

What Kabayaki Is

Freshwater eel, split open, deboned, run through with skewers, grilled, then dipped in tare and grilled again. The dipping and grilling repeat several times. Each pass drives off water, caramelises the sugars, and lays down another thin coat, which is why a good piece looks lacquered rather than sauced.

The tare is soy, mirin, sugar and sake, and at shops that have been doing this a long time it is never finished. New tare goes into the old pot, eel drippings go in every day, and the batch running now is a descendant of the batch from decades ago. That continuity is the flavour.

The Two Schools

In Tokyo the eel is split down the back. In Osaka it is split down the belly.

The usual explanation for that is that Edo was a samurai city and cutting open the belly was too close to seppuku to be comfortable, so the back it was. Osaka was a merchant city with no such problem, and belly-splitting is the easier cut.

The bigger difference comes next. Kanto steams the eel between the first grill and the glazing. Kansai does not. Steaming renders out fat and collapses the texture into something soft enough to break with chopsticks. Skipping it keeps the skin firmer and the whole piece denser and more directly grilled.

Neither is correct. They are two different dishes that share a name.

The Day of the Ox

Eel is eaten in the hottest part of summer, on Doyo no Ushi no Hi, as a stamina food.

The story usually told is that this was a marketing campaign. An Edo period eel seller could not move product in summer, because eel is fattest and best in winter, and asked the scholar Hiraga Gennai for help. Gennai told him to hang a sign saying today is the day of the ox. It worked, the other shops copied it, and roughly 250 years later the entire country still eats eel in July.

Whether that is history or a good story about history, the custom is real and it is one of the more successful pieces of advertising anyone has ever run.

How We Serve It

Our Unagi Don is grilled eel over rice with Japanese pickles and nori. Sansho pepper is the traditional partner and it is not decoration: it is citrusy and slightly numbing, and it cuts through fat in a way that plain pepper cannot.

There is also an unagi handroll if you want it in a smaller, more casual format.

Either way it wants something dry alongside. A barley shochu or a clean junmai works. Sweet drinks and glazed eel fight each other.