Paulo Barbosa
One of the well-known advantages of living in Macau is that you can, within a relatively short travel period, find yourself in such disparate and enticing locations as Indonesia and Japan. That is how I recently found myself in Kobe, the most Westernized city in Japan.
Kobe is one of those destinations known among tourists for a single offering (other examples include Lisbon, dubbed by visitors as the capital of fado, and Bordeaux, famous for its wines). Kobe’s main lure is its beef, profusely advertised in front of many restaurants located downtown. The posters invariably show slices of raw beef. The red meat has a marbling of fat throughout.
I walked for about an hour trying to find an appropriate place to taste this exquisite delicacy, avoiding the usual tourist pitfalls with English menus and inflated prices. And then I found restaurant Koushiya, where I was initially told that the place was full. When I was preparing to leave, the chef, a strong, middle-aged hearty man, said that he would find room for me if I waited 15 minutes. So I did, before a kind waitress took me to what seemed like a monk’s cell, spartanly decorated. Besides the table, only a softly- illuminated plant decorated the room, coming out of the penumbra. From inside the room, I could barely see the corridor outside the wooden door grilles.
The waitress took my order, which read like this in English: “Kobe beef – Thick cut rosu (sirloin)” at a price of 5,800 yen, equivalent to around MOP420. After I spent a while sipping a Japanese whiskey highball, she brought six pieces of raw and rosy meat beautifully cut in thick pieces. Sprinkled with seeds, the meat was served with some onion rings, cucumber, a mushroom and a small plate of wasabi.
Like in the photos, the meat looked too fatty for my tastebuds, which are used to a different type of beef – the best of which is perhaps Barrosã, a cattle breed from northeast Portugal.
After carefully grilling the meat, I was quickly proved wrong. The first bite felt like an explosion of flavors. The meat was tender and could be eaten almost raw.
Perhaps this treat is not the healthiest, which is why in Japan there are now new types of beef with less fat, like the Kampo Wagyu. Regardless of health concerns, Kobe beef is fabulous. After I finished the meal, I spent a long time avoiding eating or even drinking anything else, because the flavors were still tangling in my mouth.
But why is it so good? The animals are fed with a variety of herbs. They are even massaged and allowed to grow old, instead of being fattened and killed as fast as possible.
There is a superb documentary available on YouTube, named “Steak (R)evolution.” In search of the world’s best steak, director Franck Ribière speaks with some of the world’s best meat producers and it becomes evident that the mass-produced meat usually sold in supermarkets is of low quality. This poor quality is notorious in Macau.
Given the challenge of having to feed millions of urbanites, mass production is inevitable, but it is good to know that delicacies like Kobe beef exist.
At least I tasted the real thing once.
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