Sendai Beef, and I do mean beef

On Monday I had the good fortune to be treated to a very nice Sendai meal. Even in a small country like Japan regional cuisines abound. In Sendai the local favorite is Sendai beef. Of course they try to rival Kobe beef and I have to say my meal I had recently with my hosts in Sendai was incredible. They brought me to a restaurant that specialized in Sendai beef cooked Korean style on a table gas flame grill. They eat many parts of the cow here and one of the most prized parts here in Sendai is the tongue. Here you can see beef tongue being grilled. I found the taste to be quite good but the texture was a little tough.

After the tongue was all gone, they brought out a plate of nicely marbled meat. This was more to my liking and it was tender and delicious.

Now the thing that makes beef tender and tasty is how well marbled it is with fat. Take a look at the fine grain marbling of this shoulder cut of beef. It was melt in your mouth tender!

Next came the ribs. These were also quite good.

After all that meat I thought we were done until they brought out yet another plate. I said they eat all parts of the animal. This is marinated liver and intestines. They also tasted pretty good but I'm not much of a liver eater. I found the intestines to be very chewy. I guess it's good exercise for your jaws.

Sendai Eats

On Sunday I traveled from Narita to the Tokyo station and then took a shinkansen fast train to Sendai. Here is the local Narita station on a beautiful sunny morning

Here is the Tokyo station shinkansen platform. See everyone queuing up for their cars? You have to know the Japanese system in order to understand it. Instead of questioning it you jut have to go with the flow and everying is ok.


On the way to Sendai it is apparent that every inch of space is utilized in Japan.

Near Sendai you an see mountains in the distance.

They are crazy for this game here.

This is a food blog, after all. So I guess I should talk about some food. Below the Sendai train station there are many restaurants. I found one in particular that did not have a picture menu. I had to drag my server outside to point at the food I wanted in order to place my order. As you can see I found some pretty good shrimp tempura and noodle soup for a very reasonable 880 yen. That's less than $10 US. Pretty good deal.