This Restaurant Has Been Using The Same Sauce Base For Almost 200 Years

Everyone has a secret ingredient that makes a dish superbly different. A pinch of this or a dash of that, but what about age? Well, one restaurant’s sauce uses just that — age, coming in at almost 200 years old!

Japan has no shortage of delicious grilled food, especially the traditional dish of grilled eel (called unagi). With so few ingredients prepping, grilling, and glazing (outside of technique) are the only things differentiating one restaurant’s unagi from another. That is why this restaurant in Tokyo’s Minato ward is distinct from other grilled eel restaurants – their sauce cannot be matched, or not recreated very quickly.

You see, the eel sauce is a simple combination of soy sauce and mirin (a sweet cooking sake). But at this restaurant, Nodaiwa, these two ingredients get a special flavor thanks to the eel. As the skewers are dipped again and again into the same pot, something super important happens; grease and caramelized glaze from the cooking eel impart additional flavor to the sauce. Each day the sauce pot is topped up with soy sauce and mirin, but it’s never remade nor thrown out.

The owner, Kanejiro Kanemoto, who is in his 90s, can attest to the sauce’s age. According Kanemoto, the sauce has been added to for at least 180 years of the restaurant’s 200 years of existence. During wartime, the sauce was transferred to a safe place, so it wouldn’t be destroyed in the air raids.

Now you may think that the sauce might become a place for bacterial growth or the taste would get funky, but you don’t have to worry, the sauce is constantly heated and boiled to remove any chance of an off-putting taste. This sauce is like a cast iron skillet, the more it is used, the flavor becomes better and better!