The place was a combined retail outlet for a beef-raising operation with a sideline offering a cook-it-yourself service.
Once we’d selected the particular parcel of beef we’d like for dinner, we picked out a range of vegetables to accompany it and moved over to our table, where some hot coals had been placed under the metal grill in the middle of the table.
The proprietor got us started on the cooking process, then left us to it with a bottle of 2006 Cotes du Rhone to keep us occupied while we cooked our dinner piece by piece. Definitely delicious.
The beef, however, would never pick up a heart smart tick in Australia and definitely wouldn’t appeal to someone fanatical about trimming the fat off their steak.
We were finishing off the bottle when the proprietor returned to check everything was under control. Since it was, and other customers were conspicuous by their absence, he stayed to talk to ‘Er Indoors (English being effectively non-existent). He’s obviously someone with great pride in his home town and its regional culture, since he proceeded to bring out and unroll a number of posters about the forthcoming Takayama Festival the following week.
Although I was, more or less, an uninvolved bystander unable to catch any of the commentary the next ten minutes or so were one of the absolute highlights of the whole fortnight.
Each of the posters had obviously been rolled and unrolled countless times and showed signs of wear and tear. Someone who was doing this sort of thing for a living, or as a regular part of his day to day business would have gone out, gathered a collection of these posters, had them laminated and would, more than likely have worked up a little PowerPoint presentation that he could leave running on a laptop he could leave running while he attended to other more pressing matters.
Our host, on the other hand, excused himself several times while he attended to other matters, returning after each interruption to talk about something he obviously takes great pride in.
One interruption involved getting a young Spanish couple at the table next door started on the cook-it-yourself caper, attempting to communicate with them in extremely limited English (I presumed his Spanish is about as good as mine, which is non-existent) while commenting over his shoulder to ‘Er Indoors in Japanese. Amazing.
After that spot of entertainment there was nothing for it but to stroll the fifty metres back to the hotel, pick up a couple of cans of beer from a vending machine and retire for the night.