Sakaiya

A popular restaurant offering buta-shabu made with first-class kurobuta black pork from Gunma Prefecture. To help accentuate the flavour of the pork, the soup part of the dish contains only naga-negi (a long variety of Welsh onion) spring onion and tofu, and the dipping sauce is a simple soy sauce with no citrus fruit flavours mixed in – so as not to smother the flavour of the pork. Further accentuating the flavour of the pork is the dashi (soup stock), which has been heated, without boiling, over a high-grade charcoal fire rather than a regular gas stove. The trick here is to swish the pork around in the soup for a few seconds, dip it into the sauce and then eat it together with the naga-negi. Other fare on offer include buta-yaki, sashimi and udon noodles.