i bet everyone ever heard of the famous kobe beef. every reviews that i saw on youtube give kobe beef glowing review. that it melts in your mouth, that it's very tender and nothing ever tasted like it before. it surely makes my mouth waters every time i heard it. so, when i found out that we have about half day free, i asked my husband which one would he choose, kobe or hiroshima. and he picked kobe. so i read lots of reviews about kobe beef restaurant. every reviews mention different restaurant names, but some mentioned twice. so i listed a few, and when i check google maps, i found out that some of them are located around sannomiya station, which is perfect since the airport limousine bus makes a stop at sannomiya station and the JR train to kyoto also from sannomiya station. so i figured we will choose on the spot since we couldn't predict what time we would arrive at sannomiya station.
when we arrived, it's about lunch time. which is a bit worrying since the restaurant might be crowded already with reservations and all. but we decided to try it anyway. and according to tripadvisor, the closest one was mouriya lin and it was rated quite high, so we had high hopes. let me remind you, i do know that there are several mouriya restaurants in kobe, but i didn't know that they will be super close from each other. and each restaurants have different style though they all serve kobe beef. and, i also watched paolo from tokyo youtube video that informs about tourist trap in japan. in the video, he warned people that if a dining place has several menus written in different languages not jost japanese and english, it's almost definitely a tourist trap.
back to mouriya. this is description about mouriya lin from their website: mouriya lin is a teppanyaki restaurant and it's the 4th location by mouriya. we are confident in providing the same quality of kobe beef and mouriya strictly selected beef as our other locations. furthermore, our dishes are served in tachikui-yaki tableware, which is one of japanese rokkoyo (six ancient kilns) form tamba, hyogo. and local ingredients such as ako's salt, and other local products from hyogo such as rice, vegetables, sake, etc can be enjoyed. the restaurant has 22 seats and has a calm atmosphere thanks to the unique japanese style design. our customer uses this comfortable location for leisure, business, celebrations and so on.
the place is actually a decent walking distance from the station. it's not too far and not too close (i saw gyukaku and steakland are a bit closer), but it's a bit tricky to find the place. you can't see english sign about the restaurant, but there's the japanese character that you can notice. and at front, there's a small board displaying the short version of their price list and it gives direction that the restaurant is on the 2nd floor! so we took the elevator to go the 2nd floor.
we told the host that we didn't have reservation, but lucky for us, the restaurant is not busy at that time so we got our seats right away. we brought our cabin baggage with us, and they had place to store our baggage during our meal time. since this was a teppanyaki restaurant, they gave us 90 minutes to finish our meal. it was lunch time so we got offer the lunch course. the price is different according the meat that you pick. their recommendation was the fillet steak. we chose that one and the rib eye. the course came with soup, salad, grilled vegetables and rice or bread and drink (ice tea or wine or coffee).
the restaurant was really quiet and a bit dark. there was several long tables facing a hot surface that you could find in any other teppanyaki restaurants. i think there were 3 tables in total. our tables have 6 seats facing the chef behind the hot surface. there's only one chef serving all the people in my tables, so he would finish cooking the course for the person before us before cooking ours. but you didn't to worry since the chef will only cook the grilled vegetables and the meat. everything else came from the kitchen.
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soup and bread
you can see spices on the plate |
once you picked your choice, they will serve you with the soup first. it was pumpkin soup and it was creamy and okay. i never eat pumpkin soup before so i can't judge whether it's delicious or not. all i can say that it's sweet and creamy and didn't have strong spices in it. then you will be served the salad and something else that's cold and weird. i ate the salad for a bit, but i tried the cold stuff and i didn't like it so i didn't touch it. it has a bunch of cold vegetables in it. i could see young corn (i can't remember what it should be called), mushroom and i couldn't identify anything else. it was weird. the salad was okay, but i prefer my usual salad. somehow some of the vegetables were bitter.
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| chef's cooking the grilled vegetables |
i picked bread and my husband picked rice. i got my bread served earlier and he only got his rice almost at the end of the course. the bread was okay, pretty standard. the grilled vegetables were new to us. they chose okra, eggplant and lotus root. the lotus root and okra was okay for me, but i didn't like the eggplant. i thought it was a bit too greasy for my taste. there were two sauces to dip in your meat and vegetables. soy sauce and miso sauce. the miso one was a bit sweeter and soy sauce was salty. there were also several spices, salt, fried garlic, sesame seed mixed with pepper and wasabi on your plate. once the chef cooked the vegetables, the waiter would bring you the meat you picked and presented it to you. the chef even offered to take our picture with the meat of our choice. everyone talked a bit english, not to fluent but enough to convey the message.
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| us with our meat of choice |
then the chef would start cooking the meat. he would put the fatty part aside. then he would cook the meat according to your taste (we chose medium for our meat). he would cut the meat in tiny pieces and divided it for the two of us. he would suggest how we should eat the meat. a dip of salt, pepper and fried garlic and wasabi before dipping it in miso or soy sauce. but since we didn't like wasabi, we didn't use wasabi at all. my husband like the miso sauce better. i have to agree though, the fillet was more tender than the rib eye. it was really easy to chew and almost melts in your mouth, but not mind-blowingly good. let me remind you that we ate steak several times a year, and we have had other tender meat like that, so it was not mind-blowing to us. almost ordinary if i might say. but if i could make any recommendation, choose the fillet one. last meal was sprouts cooked with the fatty part. i didn't usually eat bean sprouts at home, but since it was mixed with beef, i could eat it. now, the portion was not that big. usually, our steak place would give us about 250 g steak for each of us. the meat selection at mouriya only weighed about 180 g so it was not that much, so we ate less than 90 minutes. then at last they would give us our drink to finish.
i would say that i have to agree with paolo. now, the person next to me was a foreigner, like caucasian and she was given a small card to make review on tripadvisor. we didn't get it so i would assume that they would ask foreign tourists to make good review on tripadvisor, that's why they got popped up on the best ranking on tripadvisor. anyway, if you asked me, i would have to say, the kobe beef is overrated. and later on our trip, we found a better choice if you want to eat japan's beef meat. so, the food was okay, but the price was not. it was too pricey for standard taste. if you asked me, don't eat kobe beef at kobe.
