Paul Loman's Blog

Deposited our cases at Kyoto station and then caught the subway to Nishiki market.
The central walkway boasts a wonderful mix of stalls: fish and vegetables, high-quality pottery, and best of all knives.

I plumped for a beautiful carbon steel sashimi knife (which didn’t break the bank) and is now inscribed with my name in Japanese by the guy pictured.

We decided we wouldn’t stay on in Kyoto but head on down the line to Kobe. The only problem was that on our return to the station we could not find the coin locker that had our luggage. It turned out that there are two entrances to Kyoto station that look very similar. We made several passes of the extremely long station frontage before we worked out that we had to go over the tracks to the other side, by which time we missed the train for which we had reserved seats.

This led to another revelation: shinkansen reservations are a bit redundant in the middle of the day when there are plenty of unreserved seats. The missed train also gave us time to visit the Paul Bocuse patisserie counter at Kyoto station where we bought something for tea.
Safely arrived at out hotel, we went in search of something to eat. Beef, of course.

We had read a blogged review of a beef restaurant Mouri which had signage in Cyrillic script. We wondered whether a Russian billionaire was bankrolling the place. It turned out that it was a version of the owners name that translated as ‘Ocean’.
We couldn’t quite bring ourselves to pay the £100 per head that it would cost to eat the highest quality Kobe beef. We settled for something a little down the pecking order.

It looked a mighty fine specimen of meat which was presented to us for inspection. We then watched as our chef prepared the beef on the hot plate at our section of the bar – teppanyaki style. He fried garlic crisps, beetroot segments, beansprouts, turnip, tofu, mushroom. No meal in Japan is complete without rice, so that appeared as well with, inexplicably, a minestrone soup course beforehand.
As can be seen from the picture the marbling on the beef is considerable and accounts for the succulent taste in the mouth. It seemed a little heretical to prefer our home-grown steaks that offer a more ‘meaty’ taste – but that was our conclusion.

Our walk after dinner round Kobe was quite entertaining. Kobe is a resort town for visitors from within Japan as well as Europeans and there are countless bars. Never expected our evening to end with a game of darts on an electronic board.