The rice comes in a wooden tub with chopped eel spread over it. You divide it into four with the paddle and work through the quarters in order. It looks like ceremony, and it is, but the ceremony is house rules rather than ancient custom.

The first quarter you eat plain. The second you scatter with spring onion, wasabi and nori and mix. Over the third you pour dashi or hot tea and drink it down like a soup. The fourth is the good part: you go back to whichever of the three you liked best and do it again. A set of instructions that ends by handing the decision back to you is a rare thing.

The tub is supposed to have been practical first. A restaurant in Atsuta kept breaking its delivery bowls, so it sent out one wooden container holding several portions to be divided at the far end. A vessel for sharing became a vessel for eating the same thing three ways. Whether the story is exact hardly matters now; the tub is the dish, and a lacquered bowl would change it completely.

Nothing changes but the treatment. The eel is the eel throughout. It finishes, usefully, just before you have had enough of it, and the tub goes back to the kitchen scraped clean.