Originally published on metropolis.co.jp on April 2010
Photos courtesy of Uroko
The milky eye popped out and rested for a brief moment, fizzing and dripping on the grill before dropping through the grating and sending up a cloud of ash onto our clapboard table.
Not an establishment for the faint of heart or the picky eater, Uroko, with its beer crate seats and bare light bulbs strung across the ceiling, resembles a makeshift fisherman’s bar. The menu consists mainly of live or barely dead seafood that’s either grilled at your table or slurped up raw.
We ordered the special mixed platter (¥3,500), and as the selection varies according to the season, we asked our waitress to explain. Bristling with piercings, she herself looked like she’d come out of the wrong end of a fight with a fish hook. But reassuring us with a quick smile, she rattled off the names of our food in quick-fire Japanese: abalone, snapper, clam, scallops, squid and fish cake, as well as asparagus kebab and pork sausage.
Not wanting to wimp out, we dived right in with the abalone. As we tentatively fingered the shell, our waitress reappeared flourishing a pair of metal tongs and slammed the snail down on the grill. That’s the kind of service you can expect: fast and furious, with the staff keeping an eye on things and giving advice on how to cook your dish.
After dousing the quivering abalone in a simple mix of soy sauce and bonito flakes, we were instructed to wait. The staff told us that once it’s ready, you take a long metal pick and dig deep inside the prehistoric beast until a squelching sound signals that the gory flesh is ready to slither out onto your plate. The blacker parts tasted musky and went well with my glass of Guinness (¥580). While I found the flavor intriguing, the dish turned my squeamish friend pale; as with marmite or natto, abalone is not for everyone.
Like the simple sauce, the drinks menu plays second fiddle to the seafood: focusing on cheap shochu cocktails, it’s really just there to get you in the shipyard mood. And it worked—as the night wore on, the landlubber crowd of arty Nakano types and Shinjuku salarymen quickly forgot their dainty manners and began telling bawdy jokes.
After we’d hardened our hearts with the abalone, we began betting whose stubborn clam would be first to gasp for air, and watched with fascination as our scallops palpitated under the heat like alien spawn. The seafood platter offered up a remarkable variety of texture and subtle flavors. By the end of the evening, we were gaily snipping off the tentacles of fresh squid with a giant pair of scissors and gobbling them down like juicy bubblegum.
To really top it off in royal style, we ordered massive oysters (¥300 each) freshly shipped in from Miyage. As the frill of this spectacular creature trembled between my chopsticks, I sank my teeth deep into its succulent flesh and experienced a divine and cruel rush of carnivorous pleasure.
