Sea eel or pike eel. In haute cuisine, kaiseki ryori, meals, this is served raw and so finely shredded on a central core of bone that it is difficult to tell that the flesh is actually meat and bone. We were served this at a kaiseki ryori and found it very difficult to eat. We had happily eaten the raw sea cucumber and the pond weed, the fish which had been vomited by cormorants and the raw liver of some nameless sea creature, but the shredded bone in the eel was extraordinary. Despite the sharpness of the knives and the delicacy of the slicing, those minute pieces of bone lodged in our beings, let alone our throats.
