Duncan Smith’s Rugby World Cup diary: Holy cow! Kobe delicacy doesn’t come cheap

A champion Kobe cow. Picture: Buddhika Weerasinghe/Getty

There is more to Kobe than its beef but you can’t escape from its meaty clutches upon arrival in Japan’s sixth-biggest city, with steak restaurants aplenty all proudly advertising the local delicacy.

With England also in town, and their attendant media army in tow, the beef is being milked for local colour ahead of their match with the United States. Your diarist is set for a longer stay with Scotland and can’t talk about beef for the next 12 days so let’s get it over with now and hopefully discover a few more layers to the Kobe onion as we move on.

Kobe-gyu is considered the gold standard, highly marbled and a good few notches above any old kind of wagyu beef, which can be produced by cattle anywhere in Japan rather than this specific region.

It’s not cheap, so there could be some eyebrows raised in the expenses departments of some of the more cashed-up media organisations in a few weeks’ time.

One of our own Scottish contingent stole an inadvertent march on Monday night when he popped into a modest-looking local restaurant. The menu, including prices, was, not unusually, all in Japanese but helpfully came with photos so the unnamed scribe (cryptic clue “harassed father of three who likes his grub”) opted for the safety of the burger and chips option only to be stunned when the bill arrived. You guessed it – not just any burger, a Kobe beef burger.

The verdict? “It was very nice and had a distinctive taste but no burger is worth 25 quid!”

He got off lightly as some prime cuts of steak can cost well into the high hundreds and even thousands of pounds.

It is rumoured that the prized local cows are plied with beer, massages and soothing music to get the best possible produce out of them, something that the Kobe Beef Marketing & Distribution Promotion Association has distanced itself from, though a spokesman could not deny that it was true for the elite rugby corps of Fleet Street’s Finest.

BYO SUSHI

Staying on a foodie theme, World Cup organisers have partially eased restrictions that prohibit fans from bringing food into stadiums during the tournament in Japan, as long as it is for personal consumption. So, essentially, a bit like the UK’s cannabis laws. Except not. The change of heart comes after inside-stadium vendors swiftly ran out of food in some of the opening games. Copious amounts of beer remained on tap but soft drinks ran out fast, too, forcing unconfirmed (ie completely made up by the Diary in a desperate bid to inject some humour into this item) reports of small Japanese children being forced to drink Heineken out of plastic pint cups like Kobe calves.

The new rule, which still excludes beverages, took effect from the match between Wales and Georgia in Toyota on Monday night.