Eel’s fun to eat, but preparing the eel for eating can be awful business. Powerful, thick-skinned eels must be wrestled, and even after butchering, the pieces continue to wriggle, giving you the sense that the fish is going to fuse back together again to take its revenge.
It's one of the reasons I really appreciate Harry & Ida’s in the East Village, which has kept a tank of live eels on hand since it opened in June. The cooks butcher approximately 300 a month to smoke and sell by the pound or stuff into a delicious sandwich with fermented kale and fresh horseradish.
