Anything involving Kobe beef in the US has a very high chance of being a scam, since it is not a protected term. Real kobe beef is extremely hard to get even in Japan.
Kobe beef wasn't exported prior to 2012, and today, the US has only received <400kg of it. Not much at all. It's almost certainly not Kobe beef if it's named as such - and certainly not if it's affordable.
Hmm. In 1999/2000 I had a $110 Kobe Beef cheeseburger (complete with truffles) at the Burger Bar in Vegas, so either (A) it wasn't Kobe Beef or (B) there was some limited exporting prior to 2012.
It wasn't, sorry. There are farms in the US that try to mimic the process, and there've been cattle flown in from Japan, which might have been what you had (but who knows, the real product isn't trademarked here).
Kobe beef is also around $300-400 for 1kg, so maybe $50-100 in ingredients alone, in Japan, for a burger, let alone what it costs when imported.
Not that it matters a great deal. You probably still got something good. There's other highly (and higher) valued beef in Japan too, Kobe is just a big prestigious brand.
Apparently, "Kobe" is used to describe many things, and, given that a prominent place like the burger bar is still selling their burgers 10 years later, their doesn't appear to be a lot of trademark police chasing people down.
"Kobe beef" is trademarked in Japan and is legally protected there, but not in the US, where anyone is free to use it as they like. You can still prove a beef cut has come from the real source via certification.
These things usually get codified in trade agreements. It seems that Japan hasn't been particularly concerned about protecting Kobe beef internationally, likely because there are so few exports simply due to production limits.
Various factors, some of which have been touched upon below:
1. There is almost 0 chance that you've tasted beef from a wagyu cow from the city of Kobe. Aside from import/export costs, the cost in Japan (having actually eaten Kobe beef from Kobe) is far closer to about $400-600 per steak (2kg perhaps?)
It's easy to get in the US, it just costs a lot. There are restaurants in NYC that have the certified product, expect your meal to run you around a grand.
I wager that most reading this in the US have $1000 sitting their bank account or in savings right now, and of the ones that don't most could somehow borrow or scrape together $1000 in less than 4-6 weeks if they really had to. So as such getting hold of $1000 is 'easy' for most people.
The average American family that even has a savings account has around $6,000 in it, total (http://finance.zacks.com/much-money-average-american-family-...). You can see how spending 1/6 of your total savings on a single meal would strike most people as out of reach.
Not to mention that ~30% of families have no savings at all.
I think we're talking past each other. I agree that spending $1000 on a single meal is impractical, wasteful and a bad idea for a whole host of reasons for the vast majority of people, but it isn't difficult to do from a purely implementation point of view. However just because something is easy to do, doesn't mean it is a good idea, and I think this qualifies as such a thing.
Are you defining 'real' as 'cattle breed X raised in method Y at location Z'? Because location shouldn't matter; I couldn't care less what the 'Kobe Beef Marketing and Distribution Promotion Association' thinks.
What do you think Kobe means? It specifically refers to a region of Japan. The breed of cattle is actually called "Wagu." If you want "kobe beef" that's fed and raised in a different manner, you can get Wagu and not pay the exorbitant prices.
'Kobe' is actually a city in that region of Japan, so the name already doesn't match the geographical location. Even pedantic-marketing Kobe beef doesn't ever have to visit Kobe.
