The name refers to a wall. Miso is banked up around the inner rim of the pan like an embankment, a dote, and the beef sinew simmers inside that ring for hours, slowly taking on the miso and mirin from the walls as they melt down.

In Osaka this is bar food. Around Shinsekai in particular the shops serving it are lined up one after another, and in the kushikatsu places and the old drinking halls it arrives still on its skewer, dark and sticky, to be eaten standing at a counter. In houses and some restaurants it is portioned into a small bowl instead, sometimes with konnyaku simmered alongside.

It is cheap, it has always been cheap, and it is available in every season, which in a city this concerned with seasonality is its own kind of statement. Oda Sakunosuke has a line about two-sen dote-yaki at a night stall, which places it in the everyday street food of the Taisho and early Showa city.

What I find neat is the naming. The dish is named after the embankment, a piece of technique that exists only during cooking and is gone by the time anything is served. The thing that was inside the wall is still just called suji, the same word it had before anyone built a wall around it.