Unlike raw sushi and sashimi, or even cooked eels, sukiyaki was something fairly familiar, a dish of cooked meat and vegetables, prepared in a way that was different enough from everyday cooking to be somewhat exotic but still something diners could relate to, although maybe not the tōfu in the dish. Sukiyaki became even more well known in the 1960s when a Japanese song retitled as Sukiyaki hit number one on the US charts.

Sukiyaki is a type of nabemono hot-pot dish where thin slices of fat-marbled beef are cooked in a shallow, cast-iron pan along with vegetables, including long negi onions, shiitake or other mushrooms, hakusai (Chinese cabbage), and shungiku (edible chrysanthemum leaves) as well as tōfu and shirataki (konnyaku noodles).

These ingredients are all cooked in warishita, a sweet, shōyu-based sauce, and when done, dipped into a bowl with a raw egg.

Mochi rice cakes or udon noodles are often added at the end to sop up the remaining liquid. The dish is cooked at your table over a small gas burner, with diners taking the food directly from the pot.

Sukiyaki can also be made with chicken as the main ingredient. It is a style of cooking well suited for Japanese wagyu beef with its marbled making it easy to practically melt.

The exact origin of the dish known as sukiyaki is unknown, but it was first served soon after the arrival of westerners to Japan when the Japanese began eating beef, something previously only rarely consumed (as medicine!) due to the importance of cattle in agriculture.

Beef eating became immensely popular practically overnight after the Meiji Emperor was shown eating meat in January of 1872. Back then, sukiyaki was generally called gyu-nabe, or beef hot-pot; there is one such restaurant in existence today that opened even earlier, Iseju, which opened in 1869.

After the Great Kantō Earthquake of 1923, slightly different sukiyaki recipes developed in the Kantō (Tokyo) region and Kansai (Osaka), mainly in the style of sauce used.

The origins of the name sukiyaki are somewhat murky. During the Edo period some people—mostly farmers—were known to grill meat (but not beef) or fish on spades, “suki” being the Japanese word for spade, “yaki” meaning grilled.

As with many things, there are differences in how people in the Kantō (Tokyo) region and Kansai (Osaka) region do things, and cooking sukiyaki is no different.

The main ingredients are pretty much all the same, but there is a difference in how sukiyaki is cooked, a difference related to warishita. The warishita used in the Kantō area is made of dashi, shōyu, mirin, cooking sake, and sugar, and is added to the cooking pot first and heated before any other ingredients are put in.

In Kansai, the warishita, a mix of shōyu, sake and sugar, is added when the meat is almost cooked, before adding the vegetables and tōfu. It is the warishita that distinguishes one sukiyaki restaurant from another, and so very important.

Once the ingredients have been cooked in the warishita, they are usually dipped in raw egg yolk before eating. The egg imparts a mellow flavor.