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Though the food looks more like art than cooking — two tiny mouthfuls of fried chicken come draped with a glossy wedge of lime, the grilled teriyaki salmon wrapped in a chignon of crisply knotted paper and oodles of soba noodles served in delicate pale blue bowls — the various nuances of the process pass me by. It may be a touch more upmarket but this is the Japanese equivalent of fish and chips, something resolutely sturdy to soak up the alcohol.

Not as stomach-lining as Kobe beef, though. The city’s other great delicacy owes a surge in its popularity to the Americans.

In the late 19th century when the city’s port was opened up to foreign trade for the first time, entrepreneurial westerners moved to the city in their hundreds (Kobe still has one of the largest expat communities in Japan).

Most of them settled in Kitano, a hilly area in the northwest of the city, whose picturesque winding lanes are still lined with the kind of grand wood and brick mansions that would look more at home in San Francisco or Munich (today travellers from Korea and China come here to get a taste of the West without the pesky business of a long-haul flight).

But, aside from some rather odd-looking architecture, one legacy that the Americans, in particular, left behind was an appetite for steak. Apparently the visitors were so taken by the tenderness of the local beef that they generated the establishment of various grill restaurants across the city. After a hard day’s drinking, we headed to one of them, Misono, to see what all the fuss was about.

Misono dubs itself the “originator” of the teppanyaki restaurant (a kind of upmarket steak house where your table is set around a large grill plate and a chef cooks in front of you) but it’s not the place to come to if you’re expecting antique wooden chairs and silk drapes. Now moved to the seventh floor of a downtown Kobe tower block, the scenery is more Bonfire of the Vanities than Memoirs of a Geisha. If you can take your eye off the huge slabs of beef being wheeled out for your delectation, the view through the floor-to-ceiling windows is like an urban fairground, a whirligig of flashing neon, hurrying pedestrians and futuristic Japanese architecture.

As we sit back in our sleek leather chairs and nonchalantly let the chef, Mr Maehara, get to work with the kind of dinner that costs £25 per 100g, he tries his best to explain the concept.

In beef terms, Kobe is as aristocratic as you can get. The initial distinction to make is whether the meat is Kobe beef (reared in Kobe) or Wagyu (reared elsewhere but fattened in Kobe) — if you’re in doubt, each animal comes with an identity card giving comprehensive information about its bloodline. Then there are the different grades. Four is in my mind the best, but true connoisseurs prefer five — so marbled with fat that, when cooked, it’s hard to tell the difference between melting fat and tender flesh. When you hear how the cattle are raised, you start to understand why. Rumour has it that these pampered beasts are bottle-fed by hand in their infancy and reared with the kind of meticulous attention that includes a daily massage and beer on tap.

More surprising information was to come at the end of the meal though, when Mr Maehara admitted that he has been partial to Aberdeen Angus steak ever since he once went out with a girl from Dalkeith. His dream then, he says, was to set up a Japanese restaurant in Edinburgh. He may have been beaten to that, but how about a sake brewery in Aberfeldy?

Details: Rhiannon Batten flew from Heathrow to Kansai, 90 minutes or so train ride from Kobe, with Japan Airlines (0845 7747 700; www.jal-europe.com), which has fares from £560 return plus tax, and from Edinburgh to Heathrow with bmi, which has return fares from £50 including tax (0870 6070 555; www.flybmi.com). For more general tourist information on Japan contact the Japanese National Tourist Office on 020 7734 6870 (www.seejapan.co.uk).

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