Every region of Japan has a food specialty, a product or dish featured throughout the area. The regional specialties are sometimes surprising. For example, the city of Kobe is well known for Kobe beef, but the specialty of the city is pike eel. Pike eel is actually a fierce-looking skinny fish rather than an eel.

Matsushima, which translates to Pine Island, is a town on the east coast of Japan about 250 miles north of Tokyo. Matsushima is near the large city of Sendai, and shares the regional specialty of grilled beef tongue.

Matsushima has a picturesque bay with over two hundred sixty small islands, each with pine trees. It draws many tourists to see the bay, and the tourists are served by a string of shops and restaurants stretching from the train station east along waterfront. We arrived around eleven one morning as the restaurants were gearing up for the lunch crowd. We saw charcoal grills heating in front of a restaurant near the train station and opted for the beef tongue specialty.

I’m used to tongue being boiled, then sliced up deli style and served with mustard. The Sendai regional dish is made by slicing the raw tongue in scant quarter-inch slabs and grilling it over charcoal. It tastes much like grilled beef steak, but with a different texture and with a beefier flavor from the fine marbling of fat. Try it, and soon you’ll be inviting friends over to throw some tongue on the barby.

We ordered the lunch “set” that in addition to the grilled beef tongue included an appetizer plate with smoked ham, a dab of thick spicy vegetable mixture, and a smoked shellfish. The soup was based on seaweed, mild and savory. It was all very tasty.

The rice was served with a grated yam and egg soup which is mixed with soy sauce and added to the rice — delicious. The Japanese rarely serve rice with a sauce of any kind, but the yam and egg mixture is one of the exceptions. It may be related to another exception, which is mix a raw egg into a bowl of hot rice for breakfast. (Raw eggs are safer in Japan than in the U.S.)

After our early lunch, we were ready for the sightseeing boat trip around the Bay.