Shabu-Shabu in Kyoto - 京都にしゃぶしゃぶ

Shabu-Shabu in Kyoto  - 京都にしゃぶしゃぶ

NOTE: This is a rather delayed post that I should have posted in my Kyoto section but I completely skipped it due to lazyness. 

The same day we visited Kiyomizudera and Fushimi Inari taisho was going to be a day where we would do some more stuff afterwards. 

One of those interesting things was eating shabu-shabu, and boy it's something every single person who visits Japan must do. 

しゃぶしゃぶ Shabu shabu in Kyoto

Shabu-shabu as far as I'm concerned is not 100% Japanese - but actually Chinese. However, it was introduced some time ago in Osaka in one restaurant called Suehiro. 

My friend told me "I hope you're hungry cos we're going to order a  all-you-can-eat portion". 

I have to say being with 3 Japanese friends made the whole dinner a great place to be. I didn't know how to do it, so my friends were doing all the hard work whilst I was talking and trying to understand Japanese and eating of course.

Let me explain you the whole set: 

You're going to sit in this normal table for 4 people and in the middle of the table there's a burner where the shabu-shabu will be cooked. The clerk will bring you a big bowl split in half with two different liquids one is water and the other is stock [although I still don't know what it is]

Someone must take her of the fire and as Miho is doing she's taking care of it. Somebody else must then take care of the meat and in this case Takuya was the man in charge. 

You have many things you can ask for side dishes, but we opted up for plain rice and it was great. Because in the end we mixed rice with eggs and even though I didn't use to like the mix, I eventually ended up liking it. 

So we started with the main dishes placing the extremely thin slices of pork and beef. Believe it or not you don't need to leave the meat for long. It cooks very quickly without OIL?!?!?! Well, that's weird for a Westerner like me - but so healthy!

Of course you cannot put a lot of meat in one go, so there's always going to be one or two people waiting for meat while the others eat. 

I'm sooooo used to eat meat with BBQ sauce or ketchup or if lucky guacamole; however, in Japan they have this amazing sauce made out of sesame seed.

Shabu-shabu sesame sauce - Delicious!

After you eat ,and eat, and eat pork and beef like you've never have done it before, they take away the meet and they bring another plate with vegetables. At that point I was stuffed like a thanks-giving turkey but anyway I kept eating - a couple of vegs would not make me any bad.