Another great meal in Japan; another stop in this great gastronomic journey. This time, Omi beef sukiyaki at Restaurant Morishima, in Omi-hachaman in the Shiga prefecture not far from Kyoto.

This is a restaurant devoted to Omi beef. This is one of the top three types of Wagyu beef, along with Kobe and Matsusaka beef, and it’s an incredible looking meat, bright red with abundant fatty marbling running all the way through it.

We had Omi beef sukiyaki, and it was remarkable. We started off with a bit of Omi beef sashimi, and then the attention was on the main dish.

The beef, thinly sliced, is cooked at the table with other ingredients, and these are then eaten after dipping them in raw egg that you beat yourself with your chopsticks. This was a sensational experience, and the beef was beautiful.

I know this is a wine blog, but if you love wine, then you are probably a lover of flavour, and flavour experiences are interesting. And as we are now realising, the visual, cultural, multisensory aspects of a meal contribute to its flavour, which is one of the things that the Japanese have understood for a long time.

A short film of the experience: