Shabu-Shabu and Sukiyaki: Japan’s Hot Pot Culture and How to Actually Eat It
By Yoshi | Japan Unveiled
There is a specific winter evening quality that I associate with both of the dishes I am going to write about today — the steam rising from a pot at the centre of the table, the specific smell of the broth or the sauce heating, the way a shared pot creates a rhythm of communal eating that individual plates cannot reproduce.
Hot pot eating — nabe ryōri (鍋料理) — is one of the most specifically Japanese forms of the communal meal, and shabu-shabu and sukiyaki are its two most celebrated expressions. They are also, despite sharing the hot pot format and often the ingredient (thinly sliced beef), genuinely different dishes with different histories, different flavour profiles, and different eating experiences.
I want to explain both of them properly, because I have seen foreign visitors eat both incorrectly — not by violating any etiquette rule, but by not fully understanding what the dish is doing and therefore not getting the full experience from it.
Shabu-Shabu: The Sound That Names the Dish
Shabu-shabu (しゃぶしゃぶ) takes its name from the sound that the meat makes when it is swished through the broth — the soft, liquid shabu-shabu of thin beef being swept through hot liquid. This onomatopoeic naming is characteristically Japanese and is also a perfect description of the defining technique of the dish.
The format: a pot of broth — typically a simple kombu dashi (kelp stock), clear and clean in flavour — is placed on a heat source at the centre of the table. Plates of very thinly sliced beef (and sometimes other proteins — lamb, pork, chicken, seafood) are arranged alongside the pot, accompanied by a selection of vegetables, tofu, and noodles.
The cooking technique: each piece of beef is held with chopsticks and swished through the hot broth — the shabu-shabu motion — for a few seconds until the meat changes from pink to just cooked. The extreme thinness of the beef (the slices are approximately 1-2mm, achieved by partially freezing the meat and slicing on a meat slicer) means that the cooking time is genuinely seconds rather than minutes. The meat is removed from the broth immediately and dipped in one of two standard sauces before eating.
The two sauces are the crucial element of shabu-shabu that most guides mention but few explain properly.
Ponzu — a citrus-based soy sauce made from yuzu (Japanese citrus) juice, rice vinegar, and soy sauce, with the additional umami of mirin and dashi. Ponzu is sharp, acidic, and clean — it cuts through the fat of the beef and provides a bright, citrus-forward flavour that complements the meat without overwhelming it. Ponzu is the preferred sauce for the fattier cuts of beef and for the vegetables.
Goma dare — a sesame paste-based sauce, thick and rich and nutty, made from ground sesame, soy sauce, mirin, and rice vinegar, thinned with dashi to dipping consistency. Goma dare is warming and substantial — it adds a layer of richness to the already rich beef that is specifically appropriate in cold weather. Most people prefer goma dare for the beef and ponzu for the vegetables, but the choice is personal.
The vegetables and tofu are added to the broth directly — they cook in the increasingly flavourful broth as the meal progresses, absorbing the beef’s flavour and the kombu’s mineral depth. The shungiku (chrysanthemum greens) in particular are one of the most characteristically shabu-shabu vegetables — their slightly bitter, herbal flavour is a perfect foil for the rich beef.
The締め (shime) — the closing course: the broth, after cooking many pieces of beef and many vegetables, has become intensely flavoured — a complex beef and vegetable stock. At the end of the meal, udon noodles or rice (zōsui, rice porridge) is added to this broth to create a final savoury course. This shime — “closing” — is one of the great pleasures of the Japanese hot pot tradition: the broth that was a cooking medium has become a soup of remarkable depth, and absorbing it into noodles or rice creates a final course that concentrates all the evening’s cooking into a single bowl.
Sukiyaki: Sweet, Dark, and Complex
Sukiyaki (すき焼き) is the older and more specifically Japanese of the two dishes — its origins predate the Meiji period’s enthusiastic adoption of beef, and its flavour is fundamentally Japanese rather than the internationally influenced simplicity of shabu-shabu.
The format is similar to shabu-shabu in its basic structure — thinly sliced beef, vegetables, tofu, and noodles cooked at the table — but the cooking medium and the flavour profile are completely different.
Sukiyaki uses not a clear broth but a warishita (割下) — a concentrated cooking sauce made from soy sauce, mirin, sake, and sugar. The warishita is sweet, dark, and intensely savoury — it coats the ingredients cooked in it with a specific glaze that is immediately distinctive if you have eaten sukiyaki before. The beef cooked in warishita does not taste like the beef cooked in shabu-shabu’s kombu dashi. It tastes of the warishita — of soy sauce and sweet mirin and the specific depth that comes from all of these flavours combined.
The cooking technique: in the Kanto (Tokyo) style, the warishita is added to the pan first and the ingredients are cooked in the sauce directly. In the Kansai (Osaka, Kyoto) style — considered by Kansai people to be the original and correct method — the beef is grilled briefly in the dry pan first, with sugar sprinkled over it, before the soy sauce and mirin are added and the other ingredients join the pan. The Kansai method produces a slightly drier, more caramelised result; the Kanto method produces a saucier, more uniformly glazed dish.
This regional difference — Kanto vs. Kansai sukiyaki method — is one of the more actively contested regional food debates in Japan. I am not going to declare a winner. I will note that I have eaten excellent sukiyaki in both styles and that the difference, while real, is not the difference between correct and incorrect but between two regional traditions each with genuine merit.
The raw egg: the defining accompaniment of sukiyaki is the raw egg — each diner has a small bowl with a raw egg beaten in it, and each piece of cooked beef is dipped into the raw egg before eating. The raw egg tempers the intense sweetness and saltiness of the warishita-coated beef, adding richness and smoothness to each bite and cooling the temperature of the meat slightly.
Raw eggs in Japan are safe — I have written a dedicated article on this topic elsewhere on the blog. The specific freshness and handling standards for Japanese eggs, combined with the hiochi-type salmonella testing programme that most Japanese egg producers participate in, make raw egg consumption in Japan a meaningfully different risk profile from raw egg consumption in countries with lower egg safety standards.
The raw egg dip is not optional in the sense that there is nothing wrong with choosing not to dip. But it is specifically correct, and the eating experience of sukiyaki with the egg is genuinely different from the eating experience without it.
Beef Quality: Why Wagyu Matters Here
Both shabu-shabu and sukiyaki use thinly sliced beef, and both dishes benefit significantly from using high-quality beef — specifically wagyu (和牛), Japan’s specific cattle breeds known for their distinctive marbling.
The reason beef quality matters more in these dishes than in most others: the cooking method is very simple. The beef is cooked briefly in a liquid medium and eaten immediately. There is nowhere for inferior beef to hide — no long braise that tenderises tough cuts, no spice rub that adds flavour to bland meat. The beef must be good on its own terms.
Wagyu beef — specifically the kuroge washu (Japanese Black) breed that produces most premium Japanese beef — achieves its famous marbling through a combination of genetics and a specific raising protocol (long fattening periods, careful feed management). The intramuscular fat that characterises well-marbled wagyu has a specific quality: it melts at lower temperatures than the fat in most other cattle breeds, which means that even lightly cooked wagyu — the brief swish through shabu-shabu broth, the few seconds in the sukiyaki pan — releases its fat fully, producing the specific buttery richness that wagyu is famous for.
The regional beef varieties — Matsusaka beef (Mie Prefecture, near me), Kobe beef (Hyogo Prefecture), Yonezawa beef (Yamagata Prefecture), Ōmi beef (Shiga Prefecture) — each have specific advocates and specific characteristics. For shabu-shabu and sukiyaki purposes, the specific regional variety is less important than the marbling grade — higher marbling (measured on the BMS scale from 1 to 12) produces a richer, more melting eating experience.
Restaurant vs. Home: Two Different Experiences
Both shabu-shabu and sukiyaki are available at dedicated specialist restaurants — shabu-shabu-ya and sukiyaki-ya — where the quality of the beef, the preparation of the sauces, and the overall experience are managed by professionals. The major chains (Shabusen, Nabezo, Zakuro for shabu-shabu; Imahan, Seryna for sukiyaki) offer various price points from accessible to premium.
But both dishes are also excellent home cooking — perhaps more appropriate to the home context than to the restaurant, because the communal pot format is at its most comfortable and most natural when the people sharing it are genuinely close.
The home shabu-shabu or sukiyaki requires: a portable gas or induction heat source for the table, the appropriate pan (a shallow, wide pan for sukiyaki; a deep pot for shabu-shabu), the sauces (available pre-made at supermarkets, with Yamasa Ponzu and Kewpie Goma Dare being reliable options), good beef (any beef counter in Japan can slice to the appropriate thinness on request), and the vegetable and tofu accompaniments.
The home version will not match the best restaurant version in the quality of the beef or the refinement of the sauce. It will match or exceed it in the specific quality that matters most in shared pot cooking: the experience of cooking together, the rhythm of the shared pot, the conversation that happens around the table while the broth heats and the steam rises.
That is what both dishes are ultimately about. The food is the occasion. The occasion is the point.
— Yoshi 🫕 Central Japan, 2026
Enjoyed this? You might also like: “Izakaya Ordering Guide” and “Japanese Whisky: How a Small Island Nation Became the World’s Best Distiller” — both available on Japan Unveiled.
