ⓌⒽⒶⓉ Will ⓉⒽⒺⓎ Think of Ⓝ€✘Ⓣ: ZAUO - The 'Sit and Fish' Restaurant, JAPAN

ZAUO - The 'Sit and Fish' (座魚) Restaurant  

I loove seafood - cooked, not raw, but eating in a restaurant like this would be a unique experience! 

Zauo (ざうお), a chain restaurant in Japan, offers patrons their seafood of choice, cooked (or not) to their liking. As long as you catch it yourself! 

It sounds like a pretty smart business plan and frankly, you can't get any fresher than this -- customers are always concerned about how fresh their seafood is, so why not just allow them to fish for their own meal?
In Japan, chain restaurant Zauo has its customers fish for their food, then asks them how their catch should be prepared - shioyaki (salt-baked), sashimi (sliced raw), nabe (cooked in a hotpot with broth), karaage (deep fried), ochaazuke (served with rice in tea and other seasonings), and others. Plus, if you successfully catch a fish, you get a discount.

This isn't quite like being out on a lake with a canoe and a fishing rod though.The diners/fishers can see the fish with no problem since the water is clear. And as you will see in the video below, the fish bite pretty easily.

The tanks are generously spread throughout the restaurant, each tank with a mix of specific fish to make fishing random but weighted toward specific catches.

Photo credit

Customers even sit on giant boats that are inside aquariums (or a side room right next to the aquarium), rather than dining tables, to fish for your meal and eat.

Video

They even had more exotic sea animals that there was only one of, like anago (saltwater eel) and same ([pronounced sah-meh] shark) that nobody in their right mind would catch because of their expensive price tag.

And as mentioned earlier, whatever you catch can be cooked any way you like - even alive, ikizukuri-style:


Video

Resource(s):  tofugu.com, geoffropuff.com

To read more about the Japanese custom ikizukuri, check out my post:
Foods Prepared and Eaten Alive