The dish now served in hotels around the world is said to have started here, in the ruins of 1945. Shigeji Fujioka opened Misono in Kobe just after the war's end, setting up a stall on the approach to Ikuta Shrine with a sheet of iron salvaged from a shipyard. On it he grilled Tajima beef bought in the black market — and that improvised plate is remembered as the beginning of teppanyaki steak. Misono holds itself as the house where it began.
What you eat
The center of the meal is beef: Kobe beef and A4 and A5 kuroge wagyu, brought to the iron and cooked an arm's length from where you sit. The theater is the point — the chef works the plate in front of you, and the meat is seared, rested, and sliced to a rhythm you can watch from start to finish. Around it come the vegetables and garnishes the plate makes possible, but the wagyu is the reason the room exists.
Kobe, from the beginning
Misono occupies two floors of a Sannomiya building — fourteen seats on the seventh, twenty-two on the eighth — a few steps from the shrine approach where the first stall once stood. For a city whose name became a byword for beef, this is close to the source of the story: the spot where an idea born of scarcity turned into one of Japan's most exported ways of eating. Booking is by telephone only.
Go if
You want to eat Kobe beef where the teppanyaki counter is said to have been invented — and to sit at the iron plate in the city that gave the beef its name.