Moritaya Shijo Inokuma

Moritaya began in 1869 as a meat shop called Seigyusha Moritaya, and meat is still the core of the business today. The company runs a wholesale operation, several butcher counters, and a farm in Wachi, north of Kyoto, where some of its own cattle are raised.

The restaurant business came much later. Moritaya Shijo Inokuma Honten opened in April 1976 on the same site where the original shop once stood. A Moritaya butcher counter still operates next door. The company now has seven restaurants, including two in Tokyo, but Shijo Inokuma remains its home base.

The scale is unusual for Kyoto. There are 182 seats, with a large dining room on the ground floor, private tatami rooms upstairs, and a banquet hall that fills with company dinners and family gatherings on weekends. The restaurant is two minutes from Hankyu Omiya Station and about three minutes from the Randen stop at Shijo Omiya, well west of the busiest sightseeing areas. Weekday lunch can be surprisingly easy to walk into, while the upstairs private rooms are usually the first seats to disappear on weekends.

Sukiyaki is prepared in the Kansai style, with a member of staff cooking it at the table.

First, beef tallow goes onto the hot iron pan, followed by coarse zarame sugar. A slice of sirloin is laid directly over the sugar and seared

before any liquid is added. Only after the beef has begun to brown does the warishita go into the pan.

Moritaya's warishita is particularly simple. Soy sauce and mirin are mixed in equal proportions, with no sugar added to the sauce itself. The sweetness comes from the zarame already melting beneath the beef. The seasoning consequently stays more savory than many sweeter styles of sukiyaki.

The first slice of beef is served before the vegetables enter the pan and is eaten with beaten raw egg. The course uses Kagoshima Kuroge Wagyu sirloin, with two substantial slices totaling about 150 grams.

After that first piece, the pan fills with Awaji onion, Kujo negi, shirataki, tofu, shungiku, Kyoto choji fu, and burdock. The second slice of beef cooks among the vegetables as their moisture and flavor gradually change the sauce. Rice is Kyoto Koshihikari, accompanied by red miso soup and pickles, with a small dessert at the end.

There is another dish that some long time customers come specifically to eat.

Oil yaki is Moritaya's own preparation, using thick slices of fillet and sirloin cooked on an iron plate with Shodoshima olive oil. The beef is dipped in soy sauce sharpened with lemon, then eaten with kimi oroshi, grated daikon mixed with egg yolk and ginger juice.

Vegetables cook on the same plate alongside the meat. Fushimi peppers, pumpkin, king oyster mushrooms, shiitake, sweet potato, onion, and carrot appear first. Bean sprouts come last, fried in the beef fat left on the plate. It is a much simpler style of cooking than sukiyaki, closer to teppanyaki, and puts the texture of the beef more directly at the center of the meal.

Anyone who has eaten at Moritaya in Marunouchi or Ginza will find the Shijo Inokuma restaurant familiar, but not identical. The Kyoto restaurants share the same suppliers and warishita ratio, while the Tokyo restaurants use a different sauce and a lighter thinning broth made with hot water and sake. Prices are also higher in Tokyo. The Kyoto main store is the place to see Moritaya in the setting where its restaurant business began.