Asakusa Imahan Honten

Imahan was founded in 1895 in what was then a working-class shitamachi neighborhood north of Tokyo proper. The founder was a meat purveyor who started serving sukiyaki to neighbors after his butcher shop closed each evening — at a time when beef was still a recent addition to the Japanese diet, having been formally legalized for consumption only twenty-five years earlier under the Meiji government. The restaurant is the same business, in roughly the same lineage of family, that has been doing this longer than almost any other beef house in the country.

The sukiyaki is served in the Edo style: thin slices of A5 Kuroge wagyu cooked in a cast-iron pan over a low burner at your table, with a sauce made of soy, mirin, and sugar in proportions the house has refined for 130 years. The server does the cooking — sliding the first piece of meat over the hot fat, adding sauce in increments, building the dish in front of you while explaining each step. This isn't theater; it's the actual technique, which depends on temperature and timing in ways most diners can't easily reproduce.

Japanese visitors love Imahan for what it represents culturally as much as for the food. Sukiyaki was the symbol of Japan's modernization in the late nineteenth century — meat as the marker of becoming a Western-style nation — and eating it in a tatami room in Asakusa, with a kimono-clad server, in a building that's been owned by the same family for over a century, condenses a lot of meaning into a single dinner. The price reflects that; the experience earns it.