肝吸い (Kimosui)

- Never Stop Dreaming -

If you appreciate Unagi or eels as a delicacy (珍味）, then when you have a chance to visit an authentic Unagi restaurant, be sure to try the Yakitori style skewered eel liver. It taste a little bitter like most fishy inerts but blanketed in Yakitori sauce, it's pretty good.

Aside from the main Unagi dish, the soup that comes with it should be eaten with a greater respect. This soup exclusive to Unagi dishes is called Kimosui （肝吸い）. Colloquially translated, it simply means "SUCK LIVER". Not a fanciful name for a soup but when you actually taste the soup, nothing else matters.

What I am so facinated about the soup is that it is presented in a dark laquered bowl and passed off like some ordinary soup. Presentation wise, it looks pretty ordinary - Plain, transparent liquid with a few pieces of vegetables and a single mushroom. Not too impressive and doesn't screams out loud with thick broth, fanciful colors or an exceptional aroma. It's just plain, dull and tasteless looking. Take a sip and the magic will be revealed.

This strange soup is ranked heavenly and probably out of range from the regular soups. Simply because to be able to put the esscence of the sea, the taste of the eel, the broth of the soup and every other distinctive taste into a plain, ordinary liquid is almost a celestial feat. How is the liquid even able to retain all these elixirs in the abscence of colors or aroma? It's almost like incorporating Zen or Buddhism in to the soup itself where emptiness, nothing, abscence is actually everything, existence, etc. The chef who made this soup has probably attained like a level 10 max skill or something which takes like 1000 years of training.

I am bemused.

Well like most Chinese customs, I like to take a sip into the appetite-opening soup before I begin my meals. So from the first sip I took from this unappealing soup, I began to appreciate it like an exotic ancient art piece, the transparent liquid, the fluid flow of the vegetables in it, etc, cleanly forgetting that the Unagi Don was screaming out loud in front of me as the gloss from the Yakitori glaze sitting on steaming white rice were attacking my vision and my nose.

So when I dug my teeth into the unagi, I almost pass out.

I shall visit that Unagi place sometime soon but you are more than welcome to join me if you decide to pay me a visit in town.

(Pictures will be available on the next trip)