They serve, you cook, and it's fun
Saturday, August 20, 2005
For the uninitiated, Shabu-style cuisine is a Japanese dinner-style, where each customer essentially boils their own meal at the table. At Shabu-Zen, every place setting has a deep hole in the table which holds a 2 pint metal container with broth (you can select which flavor of broth to start with). There is a small hidden burner of some kind that heats and boils the broth. One orders thinly-sliced meats, fish, (and tofu) and that comes accompanied by different spices, garlic and broth, noodles and vegetables. The customer cooks pieces sequentially at the table, in the broth, and generally eats them from a small secondary plate after heaping some spicy combination of onions, garlic, and other more obscure spices. The combination is flavorful. Shabu-zen is in the middle of Boston's Chinatown, the only obviousely non-Chinese place there. It fills up with local folks who are likely to be speaking Japanes, Mandarin or Cantonese, which (for those of us who don't speak those languages) gives the whole experience a layer of authenticity you won't find at Appleby's. The pricei is really tied to the meat, fish and shellfish that you order, but with drinks we ran up about $15-24 per adult. It was a long slow and very entertaining meal.