Eel and Restaurant Senju

[Secret sauce made from eel bones simmered for 5 hours]

Founded in 1993 as a Japanese restaurant in Saga Prefecture, it moved to its current location in July 2002. The owner has experience working at an eel restaurant, and has been serving eel dishes since opening in Yanagawa.

The most popular dish at the restaurant is the “Senju Seiro Mushi Set Meal.” They only use domestically caught eels and grill them over charcoal. The light sauce is made by grilling the eel bones to remove the odor, then extracting the stock, simmering it for five hours, and adding soy sauce and rock sugar. Other recommended dishes include the “Shokado” set meal, which includes simmered dishes, sashimi, and tempura, and the “Yanagawa Nabe Set Meal,” a local dish of Yanagawa that uses loach. Despite being a Japanese restaurant, for some reason the showcase at the entrance is lined with Western-style sweets such as cream puffs and roll cakes. Apparently, the owner’s eldest son, who trained as a pastry chef in Fukuoka City, returned to Yanagawa and has been making and selling Western-style sweets since November 2020. Customers who order a course meal or lunch can choose their favorite Western-style sweet for an additional fee. Customers sometimes say, “The unexpected combination of a Japanese restaurant and Western-style sweets is new.”

Due to the location of the restaurant being located right in front of the birthplace of Yanagawa-born poet Kitahara Hakushu, half of the customers are tourists and half are locals. The local customers tend to use the restaurant for memorial services and banquets. Since the COVID-19 outbreak, the restaurant has also been focusing on serving dishes and boxed lunches.