When my wife told me she had a meeting in Kobe - the Japanese bay-side city just southwest of Osaka - I jumped at the opportunity to tag along. Kobe is the port I decamped to 23 years ago, right out of college, to spend a couple of years teaching English. The four-day whirlwind trip we planned wouldn't give us much time to sightsee or catch up with old friends, but if we timed it right, there was a boatload of eating to do.

I made a mental list of dishes I wanted to revisit. Fresh bamboo shoots would be in season. Street vendors everywhere would be selling the little pancake balls studded with bits of octopus called takoyaki. Some fried yakisoba noodles wouldn't hurt.

JOHN KESSLER ON FOOD AND MORE E-mail Kessler Related: • More on food and drink • Restaurant reviews and search More Kessler Start with basics at three Buford Highway eateries  Salted cod gives kids whiff of new world (and they like it)  Colorful pumpkins have multiple uses  An iffy food approach: There's a joke in here somewhere  In the end, a bit too much wing think going on  Nibble by nibble, great meal at fancy restaurant redefined  A little midcentury classic we'd hate to be without  Grandfather's old-world life remains a mystery

I also considered the kinds of restaurants I wanted to visit: a traditional Japanese spot in Kyoto that served multi-course kaiseki cooking; an izakaya pub with loads of small plates; a fun, glossy venue for conveyor-belt sushi.

And one more thing.

During the entire two years I lived in or near Kobe, I never once made the obvious splurge on the city's great specialty — beef. The city's numerous steakhouses tempted, but the price for top-quality beef felt prohibitively expensive.

When we asked our hosts to recommend a steakhouse, they wasted no time in inviting us out to a famous one — the Kitano in the Crowne Plaza Hotel.

We gathered around a teppanyaki (hibachi) table, ordered drinks and joked about typical pyrotechnics on display at Japanese steakhouses in America. The chef soon arrived — not to flick shrimp through the air or make flaming onion volcanoes but rather to show us our steaks.

We gasped. These sirloin strips were thick and so marbled with feathery, pearlescent fat that they literally gleamed like jewels in the dim light. Out of respect for our hosts, I'm not going to venture a guess as to the price of this meal. Let me just say that the party at the neighboring table had ungleaming, normally marbled steaks.

The chef got to work preparing our meal on the teppan grill as we nibbled on a fresh green salad. He slivered thumb-size cloves of elephant garlic and cooked the slices in oil, flicking each with the tip of his cleaver, until they were golden and crisp. He distributed these on our plates, along with mounds of coarse salt, cracked pepper and hot mustard. He also gave us dishes of soy sauce and ponzu — a lighter soy-citrus juice sauce. All are steak seasonings, Japan style. Any A.1. Sauce? Don't think so.

After some pretty fancy knife work, the chef sheared the steaks of their thick stripes of fat and cut them in two. He then began cooking for us, half steak by half steak, searing and slicing, then slicing and searing until we started receiving hot, juicy, precision-cut tiles of meat on our plates.

"Try it with just salt first," he advised. That first bite was an experience of total, mind-wiping bliss. You get such an immediate contact high, and the juices from the steak flood your tongue as the flavor floods your brain. Think of a texture like foie gras married to the flavor of the best hamburger you've ever eaten.

We tried subsequent pieces with each of the seasonings and sauces. Each seemed extraordinary, particularly with a crunchy bite of garlic as a chaser.

The chef then prepared veggies, tofu and konnyaku (jiggly yam cake) on the teppan for a moment of respite. Not wasting a scrap of the precious steak, he cooked the trimmed fat down to crisp, addictive cracklings.

Then he set to work on the other halves of our steaks, which we all struggled mightily to finish.

Somehow we found room for garlic fried rice, perhaps because it was prepared before our eyes. Small wedges of supersweet muskmelon were the perfect end.

At the time it felt like a once-in-a-lifetime experience — feasting on this mystery substance poised between fat and meat. In most likelihood it will be. But as I write this, I crave it again.