Last year my birthday was our first full day in Japan. For my birthday dinner, Kris and I introduced our new friends (and our selves) to a new style of eating at a grill-your-own-meat place. This year for my 28th birthday, we continued the tradition by introducing our friends to our favorite Japanese meal, shabu shabu, at On Yasai, a restaurant down the street. Shabu Shabu is prepared by dipping thinly-sliced meat into a pot of boiling sauce and swishing it around for a few seconds until it cooks. The swishing sound the meat makes in the pot is how the dish got its name. The direct translation of "shabu shabu" is "swish, swish". Vegetables can be cooked in the sauce as well. The boiled food can then be eaten alone, dipped in sauce, or eaten with rice or noodles. At the end of the meal, the remaining broth is usually added to noodles or rice and is eaten as a soup.
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| Some of the shabu shabu crowd |
Because there was a large group of us, and because Japanese restaurants are so small (in comparison to US restaurants), we couldn't get seated for dinner until 9:00 pm (even though we put our names in at 6:00 pm)! When we finally got there, we were seated in the traditional dining area. Before sitting at our table, we had to remove our shoes and step up into the traditional dining area. All of the seats are on the ground and the tables sit at ankle-height. So when you sit down at the table, you are sitting on cushions on the floor and your feet hang down into a boxed hole below the table. Several restaurants in Japan have dining like this.
Of the nine people at dinner, only three of us had eaten shabu shabu before. Our friends just stared at us with wide eyes as we tried to explain the meal and how to order. They told us just to order for them because they didn't know what was going on. We got 90 minutes of all-you-can-eat meat, rice, noodles, vegetables, and sides. Gorging ourselves on shabu shabu was a delicious treat that I had been looking forward to for weeks. And because we are such carnivores, we didn't have room to eat the remaining broth as soup at the end of our meal. Thankfully this place had a menu in English, so it was much easier ordering. It was fun experimenting with different sauces and meats and introducing this tasty food to our friends.
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| Piles of food! |
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| All you need for shabu shabu |
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Kris cooking the meat in the hot pot. Look sis! There are 2 sides of the pot so you can have a vegetarian side all to yourself when you come to visit us!
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I'm glad I got to celebrate my birthday with some wonderful friends. We had a great time laughing and sharing stories. I even received some very unexpected gifts! I've enjoyed the last year in Japan and am looking forward to all that the next year holds.
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| Flowers and a mini heart-shaped cake Kris got me for my birthday |
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