Japan Is Eating America's Tongue

Any good New York Jew is well-versed in the pleasures of beef tongue, that gnarly-looking organ that—once cleaned of its cartilaginous taste buds and silvery-gray layer of skin—is a culinary powerhouse, becoming tender and flavorful when braised and piled between slices of rye (heavy on the mustard, please). Mexican cuisine doesn't shy away from lengua either, recognizing that its juicy texture and deeply beefy taste take extraordinarily well to a vivid salsa and a soft corn tortilla.

But most Americans are straight-up grossed out by this long, licky piece o' meat that, frankly, can be kind of phallic-looking and often weighs over three pounds. Although US meat eaters consume the second-highest amount of beef in the world (edged out, surprisingly, by the teeny-tiny Western European country of Luxembourg), they tend to stay far, far away from cow tongue. Unless you're shopping in an "ethnic" grocery store, it's difficult to find on supermarket shelves and even rarer to find on mainstream restaurant menus.

The stigma against beef tongue is good news, however, for Japan, which is importing the American offal at ever-higher rates. McClatchyDC, a Washington, DC-based newswire, reports that this previously foreign beef-averse island nation—over the years, Japan has repeatedly banned and then re-allowed imports of American beef after outbreaks of diseases such as mad cow and foot-and-mouth—now can't get enough of US cow tongue, which Japanese restaurants cook up into a staggering array of dishes. Last year, Japan once again loosened its on-again, off-again restrictions, and American exports of tongue shot up by 150 percent. The US Meat Export Federation predicts that that number will climb even higher in coming years.

The main destination of all that offal is Sendai, Japan, a northeast city of only about one million people that nevertheless contains over 100 restaurants specializing in beef tongue, or gyutan. In Sendai, you can choose from fried tongue, tofu braised in tongue sauce, roasted tongue, tongue gravy, and many, many more options. Recently, Manabu Matsumoto, from Tokyo, took his fiance to Kisuke, a cow tongue restaurant there. He summed up the flavor of the grilled beef tongue he ordered—a regional favorite—this way: "It's just delicious—that's it."

American beef producers have no problem with the Japanese demand for tongue, a product they've had trouble selling at home since the end of the Great Depression, when the prices of standard cuts of meat skyrocketed and offal was a much more common sight on dinner tables. Pete Bonds is the president of the Texas and Southwestern Cattle Raisers Association in Fort Worth. "The American consumer doesn't want it, so let's export it to somebody that does," he told McClatchyDC. And Pat Knobbe, a cattle producer from West Point, Neb., told the newswire that while in US beef tongue sells for about 50 cents per pound, on a recent visit to Japan it was worth about $8 per pound.

With restaurants such as The Spotted Pig in New York and Animal in Los Angeles touting their "nose-to-tail" philosophies, you'd think that more US beef tongue would remain within US borders, instead of being flown halfway across the world. But tastes might be changing: in 2013, Gyutan Tsukasa USA, the first US restaurant to specialize in Japanese-style beef tongue, opened in Costa Mesa, California, near Los Angeles. The Japanese-owned eatery is meant to provide visitors from Sendai with a taste of home, while also attracting the more timid American diner. As its website states, "Once you try the oxtongue from Tsukasa, you don't want to go to the other oxtongue restaurants!"