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basashi

Horse meat sushi restaurant opens up in Tokyo, becomes sushi’s latest craze 【Photos】

Those of you familiar with Japanese cuisine might have heard that horse meat, called basashi or sakura niku (cherry meat) due to its pink color, is a popular delicacy in Japan. Horse meat has been praised time and time again by many in the country for being low in calories and fat but also high in protein, all on top of a great taste.

Considering the meat’s popularity, and how more and more conveyor belt sushi, or kaitenzushi, restaurants have been adding non-traditional items like hamburger and roast beef sushi to their menus, you could say it was only matter of time before a horse meat option appeared.

Kagurazaka Nikusushi, a new trendy sushi restaurant between Shibuya and Ebisu in Tokyo, is now offering this new sushi sensation, and one of our Japanese writers, P.K., has the scoop!

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Could you eat a horse… raw? Try home-made horse sashimi straight from the butcher!

Basashi is raw horse meat cut into slices–“horse sashimi”, and a delicacy consumed in some parts of Japan. The most famous place to experience basashi is Kumamoto Prefecture in Kyushu, southern Japan.

You can order a plateful of the stuff in Japanese pubs (izakaya), and it’s said to go incredibly well with nihonshu, but our intrepid RocketNews24 reporter Mami Kuroi couldn’t find any horse meat in Tokyo supermarkets to slice up to make her own basashi to try at home. Eventually, she happened to be visiting Komoro City in Nagano Prefecture and stumbled on a butcher who stocked it. There was even a poster outside proclaiming that the shop sold the “best-quality basashi“! Seizing this once-in-a-lifetime chance for home-made horse sashimi, she bought some, sampled it and wrote about her horsy adventure for us to enjoy. Of course, it was totally raw!

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