75 Dollar Steak!
It seems like every city in Japan is famous for some kind of local cuisine. My friends in Tokyo told me that if I ever go to Kobe, that I should try the beef. So because Kobe is right next door to Himeji, I decided to stop by Kobe for dinner and try this Kobe beef that I have heard so much about. In the early evening, Boris and me arrived at Kobe Station in search for a nice restaurant that served Kobe Beef. We walked around the station to find everything buy a Kobe Beef restaurant. After hearing my stomach growl one ot many times, I finally just asked some people off the street for some help. To my surprise, they did not even know of a good Kobe Beef restaurant in the area. So we went back inside the station and asked one of the station employees if they could help us find where the Kobe Beef is and how we can get there. It turns out that most of the Kobe Beef restaurants were around the next train station of Sannomiya. So we hopped on the train again and went to Sannomiya.
After getting off at Sannomiya Station, we walked around the area and still could not fine any Kobe Beef restaurants. By this time, my stomach was really fed up with this Kobe Beef and was about to settle for something else. But I could tell my friends that I went to Kobe and did not have the beef. So we went back to the Sannomiya Statioin and asked one of the station ticket officers if he knew of any good Kobe Beef Restaurants. Surprisingly, he took out this map that had all of the Kobe Beef Restaurants in the area!
Some of the restaurants listed on the map were asking for more than $100 for a piece of steak! A couple of restaurants even quoted a $150 dollar price tag on a piece of Kobe Beef!! If Kobe has been towards the end of our trip and I had some money left over, then perhaps I would of just paid $150 price tag. But we still had a lot of traveling left and could not take a chance of running out of cash too early. So we settled for this restaurant that listed a Kobe Beef dinner for $75.
The steak was actually pretty good, but probablly would of had the same satisfaction from a $20 steak back home. I did not find the steak that extraordinary delicious to be so widely famous throughout Japan. Perhaps it is because I had the $75 steak instead of the $150 steak. I guess I will have to go back to Kobe and have the $150 steak. Maybe then I can say I really had Kobe Beef.
