鮎- Ayu (Sweetfish)

...are freakin' awesome. They are smallish fish traditionally caught by trained cormorants. The fish are attracted to fires lit on the boats. They are also very territorial and another method to catch them is to hook a live ayu and fish with it as bait; other ayu will attack it. That's pretty horrific, though I think the main way of getting them commercially now is by traps.

Anyway, they are a summer fish and usually salt-grilled. You see them at festivals on sticks, and are supposed to eat the whole thing, head, bones, innards and all. They are always skewered so it looks like they are swimming.

My restaurant does a different method, involving grilling and steaming and simmering and making the ayu super-soft, then serving them over flavored rice mixed with sauteed burdock and carrot. The leaves are tade, a bitter leaf that is often made into a violently green vinegar sauce. One of the best dishes I've eaten in my life was a single perfectly salt-grilled young ayu, so soft that the bones barely crunched, so well-shaped that it didn't lay flat on the plate but stood up on it's breast fins.