I’m sure Kobe, Japan’s seventh largest city with a population around 1.5 million, has a lot of things going for it. I’m sure it has pretty parks, great museums, beautiful temples, and some solid history. I’m sure that if I spent a week or two here, I’d find some of those things and be able to tell you all about them. But the truth is that right now I don’t care about any of that. All I want now is another bite of beef.

I am at Kobe Beef Steak Ishida, just a few minutes walk from the Sannomiya train station. To get here, I walked past some cool looking shopping streets and a gorgeous Shinto shrine – Ikuta Jinja. I barely registered any of that, focused solely on my destination, and what it had to offer. Kobe beef.

The words are almost mystical. Kobe beef, Japanese wagyu, is considered by nearly all beef connoisseurs to be one of the best – if not the absolute best – in the world. While we can get American wagyu or Australian wagyu reasonably easily in the U.S., the Japanese version is harder to find, and outrageously expensive when it is located. Deeply marbled, incredibly flavorful, this is melt-in-your-mouth beef.

Cattle were introduced to Japan from China in the second century, but more than a millennium of isolation meant the breed had no opportunity to mix with foreign stock, rendering it mainly usable for labor. However, after the 1868 restoration of power residing in the emperor, foreign cattle began to be imported, and by the first half of the twentieth century, Japanese wagyu had been selectively bred. Today, roughly 90% of Kobe beef cattle are a breed of Japanese Black known as the Tajima. In 1983, the Kobe Beef Marketing and Distribution Promotion Association was formed to protect the “Kobe beef” trademark as more specific than mere Japanese wagyu.

Of course, none of that matters to me in the moment. I’m too busy watching my master chef work the flat top in front of my seat. She expertly slices beef and vegetables, cooking every morsel with extreme care. (While the beef is the obvious star, nearly as much attention is given to each sweet potato, for instance. And just so you know, sweet potato cooked in Kobe beef fat is amazing.) My lunch special consists of an appetizer, a salad, dessert (yuzu sorbet), garlic fried rice, and a selection of vegetables off the flat top. And 110 grams of Kobe beef sirloin, grade A5 – the top of the line.

To say the meal is a treat would be underselling it by a significant amount; I savor every piece. I am told to try my beef with different combinations of soy sauce, mustard, ponzu, two different salts, black pepper, and garlic chips. Each is better than the last. It is expensive, but probably less than a quarter of what I’d have paid for this meal back in the States, running a bit over $100 per person. I think it’s a steal.

Full, waddling down the stairs back to the street, I decide that the best thing to add to a beef coma is a sake buzz. And fortunately, just a few stops on the train from this spot, Kobe offers the Nada district. In 1330, sake production began right here, and even today, a majority of sake in Japan is produced here. I find a cluster of four sake breweries that offer small museums and free tastings, and decide to walk between them, sampling my way through the history of Japan’s most iconic alcoholic beverage.

Each museum is pretty much the same, so by the third one, I have a solid idea of the industry. Sake is fermented rice wine, it was once made by hand and is now done with modern technology, and the specific recipe each of the breweries utilizes is claimed to be the best by a segment of the population. There are old barrels, dioramas of the process, videos about brewery history, and a progression of labels. To my mind, there is probably no need to see more than one of these free museums. But walking between the breweries (a total of about a mile from one to four) and sampling anywhere from one to five different sakes at each (some are a bit more guided and others are self-service) is a joy.

It is the second brewery on my list, Kiku-Masamune, that provides me with my most perfect moment, a beautiful patio with some sake samples up for grabs, and a sake soft serve ice cream cone. I eat ice cream, sip sake, and enjoy the small but beautiful garden, with its water wheel and cherry blossoms. The sun peeks out from behind some clouds, and I am happy.

I purchase some bamboo sake cups from one of the shops to inspire me to keep more sake around back at home, buy a small bottle of Sakura (cherry blossom) sake at another – it doesn’t last more than a couple nights in my hotel room – and sip yuzu liquor between sake tastes. The overly full feeling from beef in my belly gradually gives way to a lighter airiness of sake in my brain. It’s a welcome change as the afternoon progresses and I’m faced with walking back to the train to head to my hotel in Kyoto, more than an hour away.

So yeah, Kobe probably has a lot going for it, things absolutely worth seeing, experiencing, and writing about. But I stuck with the beef and the sake. And I’d do it all again.

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