Dinner - A5 Wagyuuuuuuuu!!!!!
March 2 in Japan ⋅ ☁️ 6 °C
Oh boy, here we go!!!! It was a long day, and Donga needed food, good food! While I was hesitant to spend the kind of money I knew this would require, Denise was able to take control and help me make sense of things - and boy am I glad she was there.
Gemini had come up with four options for a Wagyu Teppanyaki dinner. The first was a very nice restaurant, but many customers had complained it was over priced. The lowest option was a teppanyaki bar that served Wagyu, but it was very informal and seemed a little too low brow for what I wanted - I kind of special dinner. Denise settled on the second choice from Gemini which was close to our hotel, in the Gion district, but was considered a high class teppanyaki restaurant.
Walking the streets at night, in a slight rain - because while we scare the rain away in Ireland and Iceland, apparently, we are a magnet for it in the dry season in Japan - we worked our way until we were pretty sure we had found the right building. Remember, in this section of Kyoto, it’s hard to tell what is a restaurant, a private club, a geisha house or just a local residence! Anyway, we found the right place and were settled into a front row seat at the grill… as Flounder would say - Oh boy, oh boy, oh boy!
At first it was just the two of us and we had the full attention of the entire staff. The took our jackets, got us drinks and would have been there to wipe our chin if we had started to drool, which I came close to doing! The first thing we noticed after ordering - I got the A5 Wagyu sirloin - 200 grams and paid about $10 extra for the Wagyu sushi and appetizer course, along with the fried Wagyu rice! While Denise went with the base menu while trying to save $10 on a, well let’s just say this was a special anniversary dinner so I don’t have to tell you how much it was but it did make me a little sick, not the food, the price! But I’d do it again, maybe this life, maybe the next, but I’d do it again!
As they started to cook the meal, we noticed something unusual. If you been following the blog, then you obviously know about the Disney uniforms and the clientele… Well we got the male version of that as our chef! 🤯. My steak is like a car payment, and I get Boss Baby as my chef!!! Well, win some lose some, at least the head chef kept a very very close eye on his work - until some other Japanese customers came in.
Fortunately for Doogie Houser, I was three beers in, we now had some New York youngsters spending way more than us sitting at our grill, and this A5 Wagyu was going to probably be the best steak meal I’ve ever had regardless of how he cooked it! In the end, he did fabulous, cooking it a perfect medium rare. Talk about melt in your mouth, it was so so good. Again, not something you can afford unless you’ve gotten your spouses life insurance payout or your wife (Denise) has been hiding cash for 26 years… but man, it is definitely worth the experience once.
From there, we headed back to the hotel for a quick Onsen reset. Where once again, I got the short (I hate using that word while talking about getting naked) end of the stick (that sounds even worse), and had some westerners breaking the rules and wearing their boxers! Denise on the other hand was living the high life in the beautiful bath all by herself. Well, I’ll have you know, I manned up, stripped down, and kept my body facing the wall for as long as possible while being as tense as Taylor having to address an overweight Sgt or Connor realizing he still has to listen to officers! In the end, I think I did relax a little and got back to the room in time to enjoy my last Hakuba local beer! At this point, I would have preferred Sake or maybe LSD, but either way, I was going to get to sleep!Read more