Tue 24 Mar 2009 12:26 am
A sukiyaki feast in full swing. (David Dickey photos)
Several weeks ago, we got a note from our friend Eric. It began:
“Real sukiyaki is something to behold. Like shabu-shabu, the raw ingredients (thin sliced beef, napa cabbage, shiitake, tofu, shirataki noodles) are brought to the table and the cooking happens on a hot plate right in front of you. The large shallow pot has a simmering sweet-salty sauce. After cooking in the sauce, you dip each bite in your own bowl of beaten raw egg. This is key, as it cools the food down and adds delicious richness.
I bring this up because I’ve been talking to Taichi Kitamura of Chiso and Kappo about doing a traditional sukiyaki dinner.“
The brain-reply connection didn’t take more than a second before we said we were in. Eric and his wife Kye have introduced us to some unparalleled dining pleasures, from the sticky-crunchy goodness of Chicky Pub to the super-addictive umami of the chilled noodle soup called mul naengmyun.
Our group of nine gathered at Kappo on Friday. It’s the quiet, spacious, private dining room upstairs from Chiso. Kitamura told me in an e-mail that he opened it so he could introduce types of Japanese cuisine that aren’t well represented in Seattle.
Sukiyaki is a difficult dish to serve in a traditional restaurant, in his view, because diners need so many directions, essentially a server’s undivided attention, when cooking the food themselves. It also requires enough special ingredients and advance preparation that, even at Kappo, he only offers it by advance reservation.
Our group went for the $75 sukiyaki dinner, which included appetizers, dessert, enough red meat to shave months off our collective lifespan, and enough leftovers to feed all nine of us the next day’s lunch. (Our table had three of these large round platters layered with overlapping pieces of ribeye sliced for Taichi by the meat department at Uwajimaya.)
We began with an appetizer of tuna marinated in yuzu juice, over Chinese mustard greens.
Next came an iced plate of Shigoku oysters, a dish I’ve been waiting to try since I foolishly passed them up one Saturday at Oyster Bill’s Taylor Shellfish stand at the University District Farmers Market. The clean, crisp, tide-tumbled were already tough to get — and, as Taichi told our group, it got a lot harder to find them after their first dose of stardom.
Then, the main event.
Our server brought burners to each side of the long table, holding a bubbling cauldron of a light broth made from soy sauce, sake, cane sugar, and water. I had expected mirin, surveying other recipes, but Taichi said it could make the meat hard. He did add a piece of konbu kelp and a dried chili pepper “for extra umami flavor.”
We all had small bowls in front of us to break in an egg for the dip. Taichi offered either pasteurized or unpasteurized eggs; he recommended the latter for better flavor. After my previous look at the issue, I went for unpasteurized. It did, as Eric promised, add to the texture of the meat, not only cooling it but easing the friction that can make meat hard to swallow.
The drill was simple — a little like a savory fondue session, or a liquid translation of manning bulgoki on the tabletop grill.
We dropped in slices of onion and cabbage and enoki and chrysanthemum leaves for long simmering to enrich the broth. Shitake mushrooms, soaked for a few minutes to soften, proved as satisfying as beef — except that each supple, silk-thin round of meat added depth and flavor to the broth as we swished it to and fro for the seconds it took each slice to cook.
As the steam boiled off from the pot, we slowly noticed the broth concentrate and grow even more potent. Our server topped off the bowl with fresh broth, and it concentrated in turn. Near the meal’s end, it had become rich and salty to the point where we dropped in chunks of tofu and noodles and chubby rounds of wheat gluten, which puffed up like cereal, to draw out the flavors we had added in.
Perfect balance.
10 Responses to “ Sukiyaki at Kappo ”
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[...] were as crisp and refreshing as I remembered them from our Chiso Kappo Sukiyaki event (click here and here for more on that) and the shallot kick was a nice touch. We noticed they also serve a [...]
Nice pictures and write-up, Rebekah!
Glad you and the group had a nice introduction to sukiyaki. It’s a fun, communal experience.
I’m lucky to have it at home fairly frequently for about $7.50 per person instead of $75 per person! It’s not the fancied-up, restaurant version, but it’s delicious home-cooking - and I think it’s valuable for people to know they can do a version of this at home for reasonable cost. Prep is super-fast and easy. You don’t need to serve so much meat, which also makes the meal more nutritious and still delicious!
Thanks, Jay! Good point. The oysters, tuna, and dessert were also part of the price, though, so it’s not quite a $7.5/$75 comparison.
And that folks is why Rebekah has one Beard award for food writing and is a finalist for another. I was at this event, but after reading this piece I’m wishing I could do it again.
The photos are really outstanding. Rebekah, you have one fine photographer ;^)
Great post and photos! Robin and I enjoyed the experience immensely. We’ve never actually had Sukiyaki before, so it was novel to us….and we always love communal dining experiences like this, especially with a group of highly dedicated foodies. By the end of the meal, that broth was truly delightful with the umami flavor and richness.
If only I could have been there! Oh wait, I was there. I can’t believe you got such great photos in low light!
My favorite items were the shiitakes and the cabbage. Napa cabbage is my favorite food, at least some days. The chrysanthemum leaves were also great.
If anyone is looking for a good sukiyaki recipe to recreate the experience at home, here’s one. You can make the broth less sweet if you like; in retrospect, I think I used too much mirin.
Thank you, all! Eric, your description of it was great — enough to entice us all into coming!
Matthew, thank you for the recipe. I’ll be trying it at home — once I get past the backlog of Hungry Monkey recipes on my list.
Reminds me of a meal I had in San Francisco in the early 70’s. I was a total neophyte to Japanese food and had no idea what it was I had eaten, only that it was delicious, and certainly bears no resemblance to ’sukiyaki’ dishes I had occasionally in the years since.
Thanks for the wonderful description and photos.
Although I grew up eating this dish on a frequent basis and came to think of it as “Mom’s Tuesday night meatloaf,” your writing about it raised this dish up several notches in my revived estimation! Have you ever tried “mizutaki?” Another wonderful Japanese hotpot communal meal which can easily be made to highlight the different seasons. I have the most unusual dipping sauce recipe for mizutaki or Chinese styled hotpot (Asian fondue) that uses fresh tarragon. So good that one is tempted to pour it over hot rice and leave it at that!
Rebekah, thank you for your excellent writing and while I dearly miss my Wednesday morning tea sittings while pouring over your PI food reviews am very happy to continue reading your work online. Ditto on the fabulous photos as well. I’ve got visions of sukiyaki food platters dancing in my brain and the desire to eat Shigoku oysters at 10 am in the morning!
Looks absolutely delicious! I’ve only had sukiyaki a handful of times at smaller/cheaper restaurants. Nothing compared to the beautiful dinner had by you. I have had the pleasure of eating shabu shabu in San Francisco and have since been on the lookout for great shabu shabu places in Seattle (been to Warabi and Koji’s). If you have any suggestions, I’d love to know!