Salted Sea Snail and Friends [Japan]

It's beautiful! It's delicious! It's snail! This was served in a long slew of little dishes in a hotel near the hot springs around Mt. Fuji. The white stuff of course is salt. The rectangular object on the right is some sort of combination of tendons, shrimp, and congealed rice. The left of course, is fish.

Taste:

I'll begin with the snail, since it's the most extravagant of the three. A sweet teriyaki sauce was lightly drizzled in to the shell, forming a savory combination with the salt bedding. The taste itself is quite pleasant as it first enters your mouth. There was no detectable "aroma of snail," though there was the tell-tale scent of the sea. Subtle though--nothing unpleasant. The texture was surprisingly consistent and homogenous throughout, unlike shellfish like mussels or somesuch. The dish was also surprisingly easy to chew, more resembling hardened dofu than the French Escargot kind of feeling that I expected.

The fish on the left side of the dish carried the same teriyaki-ish sauce as the snail, though the texture was of course dramatically different. In fact, it's difficult to describe a whole fish's texture in text--it's a complicated thing, with all those bones and meat involved. Chewy, crunchy, soft. It has it all.

The object on the right was not memorable, and my notes on it are sparse. If you've tried Chinese Dim Sum before, your imagination will probably suffice for how that one went.

Reflections:

I liked this meal. They provided us with a lot of little things to try in an idiot-proof way to try them, all packaged in a distinctly Japanese feel. There was a plate of fish later on that was pretty much a disaster, but aside from that, I have pleasant memories of this experience. Snail ain't nothing to be shying from.