Spoilers follow for the attacker, the food clues and the ending.
Genta’s Casebook of the Eel, international episode 1226 (Japanese episode 1168), is an anime-original case. Department-store salesman Hiroyuki Okamoto attacks the chef at Ginpachi, then serves a customer while pretending to be the man he has injured. Genta’s familiarity with the restaurant’s eel dishes exposes the substitution.
A delivery job becomes personal for Genta
Conan, Ayumi, Mitsuhiko and Haibara spot Genta running with a food carrier after he was supposed to have gone home. Ginpachi’s chef has hurt his leg, so Genta is helping deliver unajū, grilled eel served over rice, on the busy summer day associated with eating eel.
When he returns, a crowd and police have gathered at the shop. Takagi explains that the chef has been stabbed in the left chest with an eel spike and is seriously injured. Genta’s wish to help the man immediately becomes determination to find his attacker.
Genta last saw the chef at about 3:30 p.m. Soy-sauce deliveryman Yuya Kurashima finds him in the kitchen at 4:30 p.m. Between those times, salesman Okamoto visits to ask the chef to supervise eel products for a department-store sales plan, and customer Rio Matsui collects food at 3:45 p.m.
Genta remembers passing an unfamiliar man with Aoiya department-store paperwork and then hearing the chef angrily order someone out. Okamoto says his visit lasted only about ten minutes before he was turned away. His account presents a failed business approach rather than a violent confrontation.
The customer’s leftovers do not taste like Ginpachi
Matsui has ordered five portions and offers the Detective Boys what remains. Genta notices that the flavor differs from the restaurant’s usual food. His appetite gives him a useful comparison: he knows what this chef’s cooking is supposed to taste like.
Back at Ginpachi, the children find that Beika soy sauce has been used. Kurashima explains that the restaurant had stopped buying it a year earlier after complaints that its taste had deteriorated. Its use in the meal is therefore inconsistent with the chef’s established choice.
On another visit to Matsui, Conan shows her a photograph of the chef. She says the person who served her was someone else. The food’s unusual flavor now has a more serious explanation: the man working in the kitchen was standing in for the injured owner.
The preparation method and missing fan point to Okamoto
Genta also identifies the eel as split along the belly in the Kansai style. That differs from the Ginpachi chef’s usual Tokyo-style preparation. Okamoto is from Kansai, giving the culinary difference a connection to a specific suspect rather than leaving it as a general complaint about the meal.
A hand fan needed for the charcoal grilling is missing from the kitchen. Okamoto has taken it with him because he could not remove his fingerprints from it. The fan connects him to the cooking that took place while the chef was incapacitated.
The reconstructed sequence explains the customer’s unexpected encounter. Okamoto became enraged when the chef rejected and shouted at him, and stabbed him with the eel spike. A customer then arrived before he could escape, so he acted as the chef and prepared her order to get through the interruption.
That improvised performance left a series of differences: the wrong sauce, an unfamiliar cook and an eel prepared in another regional style. The fan he removed to conceal his presence then becomes evidence of that same performance. The customer’s meal preserves what his account of the short visit leaves out.
Genta helps catch the man who hurt his eel mentor
When Okamoto tries to flee, Genta jumps down from the stairs and restrains him. The burst of action completes a case in which Genta has contributed much more than enthusiasm: his taste memory and knowledge of the chef’s habits have been central to exposing the deception.
The chef survives. During a visit afterward, he reflects on what happened and promises Genta more unajū. The warm return to the food Genta loves softens the earlier shock, while his concern for the chef gives the familiar eel jokes a sincere purpose.
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