Saturday, July 17, 2010

Musashi Japanese Steakhouse in Las Vegas (food, VegasSummer10)

The Travel Channel's many food shows have led me astray before, but Musashi makes up for all the bad advice. I went there last year, and I'm beginning to think that I will go there every time I'm in Vegas from now on.

They make a big deal out of the Kobe beef, but it is indeed a big deal. I asked to look it over before ordering, and here's what they showed us.

Not bad, eh? It gets better. The price is $136 for 9 oz of this beef in addition to the normal teppanyaki set of rice, vegetables, soup, salad, and shrimp appetizer. The relatively cheap price for what they said was A5 Kobe beef obviously raises some suspicions, but I didn't care. If I had to guess, the difference in price could stem from the part of the cow this is from, just as different cuts cost different amounts of money. But with Kobe beef with that marbling, do I really need to eat a filet as opposed to whatever other cut?

Here's our chef, flipping his utensils before we start. There are only two chefs here. The owner with his back to us, who is Japanese, and our guy, his brother-in-law who is Korean.

Dim the lights, set the grill on fire, let the show begin! It's like being at an NBA game.

We start with fried rice. Delicious, hot, and well-seasoned.

The ubiquitous onion volcano while he made our vegetables.

Our vegetables included sprouts, zucchini, and mushrooms. The sprouts, loaded with black pepper, were especially good.

There were only a couple shrimp included in the set menu, so I ordered some extra.

They make all their sauces fresh. The sesame sauce was nice and included a cool lemon slice trick. They also had a terrific teriyaki sauce that was not as sweet as the regular ones. In fact, our chef told us that the owner was offered 100k by a restaurant group for the recipe but wouldn't sell.

The kobe beef. That piece was for both me and my friend BM.

Cooked to a beautiful, melty, medium rare. He didn't think it needed any sauce, but did provide a light wasabi cream sauce which went really well with the beef. Gave it a nice little kick without taking anything away from the beef's flavor.