Shabu shabu, or Japanese hot pot, is a classic dish of thinly sliced meats and fresh vegetables simmered in broth and served with a bunch of dipping sauces. Much like Chinese hot pot, everything is cooked piece by piece at the table.
Lots of the shabu shabu places in Tokyo can be kind of intimidating if you’ve never been to one. Trying to decipher shabu menus might lead to your very own Lost in Translation moment where you end up playing a visual game of spot the difference in each photo. Spoiler alert: they’re all basically cuts of meat differing in price depending on the cut and provenance/quality of the meat.
Probably the most intimidating thing about shabu shabu though, isn’t really the menu. It’s probably the fact that it can be astronomically expensive. They take meat seriously in Japan and the cost of a high-end shabu shabu meal can reflect that. So, if you’re looking for a more affordable, modern, easy to eat, low key shabu place, here are a couple of suggestions!
Yamawarau Omotesando
Yamawarau Omotesando
Our First Shabu Shabu Experience
Mike and I are kind of new to shabu. I mean, we’ve eaten millions of hot pots and nabes, but shabu is kind of a different creature. And because we never tried it before we didn’t really want to go to a super expensive place as our first experience. Instead, we went to Yamawarau Omotesando.
Yamawarau is a little place in Omotesando, on the second floor, hidden behind some modern Japanese woodwork. Everyone gets an individual pot and the entire menu is essentially courses. We went for lunch and it was busy and full of tourists. The lunch set came with your choices of meat, vegetables, and a bowl of rice. It was good but busy and a little too…popular. Anyway, we enjoyed it and it kind of gave us a taste for shabu which led Mike to discovering our current favorite shabu shabu lunch: Shabu Shabu Let Us.
Shabu Shabu Let Us Nakameguro
Shabu Shabu Let Us Nakameguro
Our Current Favorite Shabu Shabu in Tokyo
Shabu Shabu Let Us is a play on lettuce and they definitely live up to their name: there are a huge amount of vegetables that come with the meats. Let Us is a fairly new restaurant located in still cool Nakameguro and they’re expanding rapidly. It’s pretty popular, but most of the people we saw there were locals having a leisurely lunch. Like Yamawarau, Let Us does individual 1 person 1 pot shabu shabu. The room is modern and fun with a huge wall of vegetables being grown at the back off the restaurant.
Each table has a pot and burner in front of each guest. The little pots are made of copper and are super cute and the variety of veggies you get is insane! There’s even a board up front that tells you which farms the vegetables come from. I loved it so much. There are eight different kinds of soup stocks to choose from and they have a help yourself sauce bar that has the classic ponzu, miso, and sesame sauce along with some unconventional ones like truffle oil and Chinese mala spicy sauce. The lunch menus are super affordable and all of the meat is domestic Japanese pork and beef.
We loved it so much that we went twice during our trip. So good!
