Hey, how do you like to eat your high-class local beef? Dipped in squid guts and seared within an inch of its life on a piece of hot rock recently extracted from the gates of hell? What a coincidence! Me too! This is the place for you!
Kawakami is a little out of the way – it’s in Takayama for a start, and even then it’s at the very far northern end of the shopping street. Actually quite some distance after the stores have run out, so I’m not sure how you’d find it unless you were just walking aimlessly around. If you know the geography, it’s about as far north as Hachimangu’s enormous torii, but on the other side of the river. We found it while…walking aimlessly, actually coming to it from the back and thinking it was someone’s house (judging purely by the young mother and baby playing in the back room). At the front, it has a clean-and-neat, recently-constructed-but-traditional look that tends to imply to me that the proprietors are serious about what they do.
Since we weren’t available for dinner (see previous post on Sakana!), we went for lunch. Inside is a little older than expected, almost like they transplanted a lot of the fixtures and fittings from an older restaurant elsewhere. I guess I would say outside looked