Sunday is our day in Kobe. We’ve made a dinner reservation at Kobe Plaisir for lobster and Kobe beef. Making the reservation was not a small challenge, mind you. Most restaurant reservation systems are in Japanese only. After messing around with cut-and-paste into Google Translate for a while, I figured out that Microsoft Translate not only does a decent job, but also offers a convenient action in Safari on iOS to translate the page you’re viewing. It let me get a mostly translated page and choose when I wanted a reservation, how many people I wanted, and what I wanted to eat! This significantly reduced the number of points and smiles Karine had to do once we got to the restaurant.
Kobe is a 12-minute Shinkansen ride from the Shinkansen station in Osaka. It makes for a perfect day-trip destination. Right next to Shin-Kobe station, there’s the cable car station for the Nunobiki Herb Garden. It might seem boring, but it turned out to be anything but! It’s a beautiful garden that gently slopes from the top of the hill behind Kobe. You get a view on the city, tons of flowers and edible plants with paved food paths and stairs. It took us about 40 minutes to go through the garden and the greenhouses, with Karine taking a bunch of pictures of the many flowers.
Outside the garden, there’s a hiking trail that departs from the midway station of the cable car. It’s another 40-minute walk to get back to the train station, but you walk in the forest and meet waterfalls. One could take the cable car down, but that would not be us.
When we exited the garden through the gate, made to keep the wild boar out of the pretty flowers and the many edible plants, we came to an intersection. The map showed we should go to the right when exiting the gate but road signs said that we should go to the left if we want to go to the falls and the train station. As the map is essentially a red line over a white background with a couple of points of interest highlighted on it (so essentially useless as a way to navigate) we chose to follow the street. Little did we know at that point that we chose poorly.
We walked down a very windy paved road for about 0.8km before realizing that we haven’t seen the reservoir and the sets of stairs that are marked as a shortcut to the falls. We also started hearing water but it’s far from us and we do not seem to be heading for it if we keep following the road. Looking more closely at our surroundings it quickly becomes clear that we won’t see the falls if we stay on the road we’re on. At that point going back uphill and going the other way at the gate is no longer an option for us as we have a reservation for the diner and would miss it if we did so we have to resign ourselves to missing out on the falls.
Going down a little further however allows me to spot the hiking trail just a little below us and a little to our right. It’s a steep cliff but only about 5 meters high. Looking at the map, the road we are on will move away from the trail shortly and is unlikely to get close to it before it reaches the bottom of the hill. Not wanting to miss the views and preferring a hiking trail to a paved road we make the “jump” and get on the trail. We didn’t jump a full story (4.3m), we were able to follow a ledge until there was about a 1.5m jump. We got a little dirty and did make one or two scratches but we got on the trail and enjoyed about half of it overall. Bonus! We didn’t miss the falls!
The Nunobiki falls are not very high falls and there’s not that much water either. Their surrounding, however, makes them beautiful and worth the little scratches we got heading there. We had to Google translate a couple of hiking signs as they are mostly in Japanese (we did find a couple in English). If we hadn’t been careful we would have missed the branch leading to the stall with vending machines (you’ll never be far from a vending machine in Japan) that’s just in front of the falls.
Hike done we made our way to Kobe Plaisir for diner. So, the thing you should know: the thing North Americans call a Japanese Grill doesn’t exist in Japan. Nobody is making a show with the preparation of food. However, like sitting at a sushi counter where the sushi man will make your sushi in front of you, there are restaurants with a counter and a hot plate behind it where cooks will, with great care, prepare your steak. Kobe Plaisir is that kind of place.
The first thing you notice when you’re seated at the counter is that there’s a bib on your plate. Not a napkin to put on your pants but a bonified cotton bib with the restaurants logo on it. You quickly understand that no serious restaurant in Japan would survive the shame of accidentally staining one of their patron shirt or dress with oil, hence the bib and, that putting a barrier between you and the meat they are so proud of is unacceptable.
In total we had 7 courses: appetizers, soup, lobster, salad, steak, fried rice (with the grits from our steaks as seasoning) and desert. They were all excellent but, of course, our hearts belong to the Kobe Beef. It was juicy, flavourful even if barely seasoned and cooked to perfection. All steaks will now be compared to it from this day forward.
With our belly full we did the 13-minute Shinkansen ride back to Osaka dreaming of tomorrow’s “food day”.
- Osaka metro is a little confusing (specially finding the exit) but google map is not helping
- Kobe herb garden really worth going take the cable car up and walk down. When you get to the midway station, regardless of what the panels says, turn right when exiting the gate.