stay at Hakuchōzan

traditional izakaya, sukiyaki, udon and shabu-shabu.

Shabu Shabu is a Japanese hot pot dish, Nabemono, with paper-thin sliced beef.   It is cooked at the dinner table using a portable gas stove and we eat it as we cook.  There are a lot of Shabu Shabu speciality restaurants in Japan, but you can prepare it at home too.  The single most important ingredient of the dish is beef.  If you can get good quality meat, the rest is not hard at all.

The origin of Shabu Shabu is said to be when a restaurant in Osaka started serving it in the 1950s.  It is like Mizutaki and it is still cooked and eaten at the dinner table, but you don’t pack the pot with meat or fish and vegetables like other Nabemono.  You dip very thin slices of beef in hot Kombu broth and swirl them around a few seconds. Then you eat the hot meat with sauce.  Other kinds of thin meat or fish can be cooked in the same way (and still called Shabu Shabu), such as pork, crab, and blowfish, but beef Shabu Shabu is the most popular one of all.

Expertly prepared before your eyes by Niseko locals.