Brian & Angela Anderson Family: Cow Tongue and Cow Tail Soup

There were three of us colleagues who are meeting together here to do research. Sylvain Haupert is a researcher in Paris, France who I had known well from his long visits to my lab and Yoshikazu Ohara our host at Tohoku University. Yoshi told me that I should get some rest and that I’d meet them around 2 pm when Sylvain arrived that afternoon. I spent some time that morning geocaching and found that my GPS wasn’t working great and led me around to areas far from where I should have been. I then finally found one on top of the Sendai station where there was a parking lot and a nice view of the city. Here's the view from the geocache location.

This photo was taken on from the top of a tall building in Sendai and gives a good idea of the size of the city, just in one direction (this building is in the middle of the city).

I then found a bench under a tree on an elevated walkway to sit down and I called Mom and Dad. While talking on the phone, I told my parents of my experiences from the morning and told them that Yoshi had told me that one of the things that Sendai is known for is cow tongue food. I told Yoshi I was nervous about trying that. He had plans to take us to various restaurants to try these kinds of things. After the phone call I decided to be brave and just pick a restaurant to have lunch. I found an 8 story small building with a restaurant on each floor (typical in downtown). There were various menus in the elevator area and I selected one that had photos of the food dishes on it and it looked like Teriyaki style meat, which I enjoy so I decided on the 5^th floor restaurant. As soon as the doors opened they greeted me and immediately showed me to a seat at the bar like counter where the meat was being grilled. There was even a waitress waiting at my seat with the chair pulled out even before I started walking towards my seat. It was amazing how fast they prepare for you to sit. I took a menu and selected a dish without really knowing what it was. I didn’t want too much food so I didn’t pick a very expensive one, though all of them had similar meats.

There was a drink of tea provided which I ignored. I used my phone to google translate and ask for water which they were happy to provide. My dish came fairly quickly and it smelled good. I started with the meat and rice bowl and enjoyed it. The meat seemed to be some sort of beef. The soup looked like just a vegetable soup but it had three large meat chunks in it. I don’t know what that meat was but maybe it was pig (one piece had bone in it). I enjoyed the meal and then used my phone to translate “It was very good. How do I pay?” They were pleased and brought me my bill.

Later I met up with Yoshi and Sylvain and proudly told Yoshi how bold I was with my food selection. I showed him the receipt and it was then that I discovered that I had in fact had cow tongue at the very restaurant that Yoshi had planned to take us to! The meat on the rice bowl was the tongue. It was just fine and I’m certainly glad I didn’t know beforehand what it was or I may not have eaten there. In retrospect, I’m not sure why eating cow tongue makes us Americans cringe. It’s just a different part of the body. I guess it’s mostly a matter of what you’re used to. Then Yoshi took us to a tall building in Sendai to take some photos of the view of the city (the second in this post). It’s larger than I thought. Sendai has a population of about 1,000,000 and I could barely see the ocean with buildings everywhere. On a later occasion we all 3 went back to this cow tongue restaurant.

The evening of the first cow tongue meal day, Sylvain and I decided to walk around and find a place to eat dinner. We finally settled on a fairly small restaurant that was basically down an alleyway near some other small ones. It was not much larger in total size than an average American home kitchen. There were a few people already eating. We pretty much had to select a menu item at random since there were no photos and we could not read the characters. The food was good, it was ramen noodles in a soup with pork. While we were there, the TV was on and there was some kind of game show on with people singing. Much of the time I kept hearing Japanese versions of songs from the movie Frozen, like Let it Go. I thought how interesting is was to be halfway around the world in some small shack restaurant and to be hearing songs from Frozen.

On a Saturday Yoshi took us to the same cow tongue restaurant that I had happened upon, just in a different location. It was then that I learned that not only did I eat cow tongue meat, and also was going to have yet another meal of it again, but I also learned that the soup is cow tail soup with the pieces of meat in the soup being the cow tail meat! Here's a chef cooking the meet over hot coals.