One of the things I love to do in a foreign country is flip through channels. As you might expect, Japan has some pretty bizarre TV. There was a talkshow that we watched for quite some time where the host was a CG character: a five-foot tall woman with a three-by-two-foot head. I’ll admit it was mesmerizing for a while, but I’ll never understand the point of her.
We also watched a show about superheros fighting with magic swords, and finally a sciency-type show about flounder, and in true Japanese style, the end of the show was about serving up flounder as sushimi! 😀
Anyway, today was our last full day in Osaka—accordingly, we decided to head back to Kobe for the day! Our hearts were set upon returning to the amazing steak restaurant, so we had the hotel concierge call for reservations. Unfortunately it was completely booked for the entire day as usual. But we went to Kobe anyway, there are a lot of decent-looking places there, some of them should have some space for us.
We returned to our old steak restaurant anyway on a whim, maybe someone had cancelled? But reception said they were sorry, they were still completely booked. However, then as luck would have it, our chef from before happened to poke his head out and he recognized us! We respectfully nodded our heads, and he said “again?!?” in a tone of surprise. We nodded more vigorously and he came out and elbowed reception out of the way, pushed a lot of buttons on the computer screen, then told us “one!,” holding up a single finger. Meaning we now had reservations at one o’clock!! It was a miracle lol we were so happy. We killed an hour wandering around again, and then had our fantastic lunch, every bit as good as the first time. When it was sadly all over and time to say goodbye, our chef came over to say “see you next time!” with a smile. This was a huge joke for such a staid professional Japanese chef to make, we felt honored. And a bit smug that we had gotten ourselves in where the concierge hadn’t been able to.
Now it was time for a sake tour! Well, the “tour” part was walking through Kobe just to get to the place, as usual for us it was a bit off the beaten path.
The brewery was pretty cool, they had a whole museum about the history of sake.
You learn things when traveling obviously, and what we learned is that the best restaurants are typically on the 4th floor. We finally figured out where the restaurants in Osaka were all hiding: department stores, train stations (seriously!), big multi-floor indoor spaces. Our incredible dinner tonight was on the forth floor of some place lol it was like 3x what I wanted to eat that night, but hey what can ya do…
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