What’s the beef with a $10 Kobe burger?

Does the word “Kobe” ring a bell? No, not him. Kobe beef, from Japan, specially bred, outrageously priced, and most important, intensely marketed. By the way, it’s not “KO-bee” as in Bryant, but “ko-BAY,” as in parfait. Kobe beef comes from Wagyu cattle, which are raised in the Hyogo region of Japan, the capital of which is the city of Kobe, as if you didn’t know all that. You might also remember Kobe for the earthquake that nearly demolished it in 1995. But we’re not here to talk about earthquakes. We’re here to talk about beef, specifically Kobe beef, which will be appearing at a diner near you soon.

That’s because Ruby’s Diner in Newport Beach plans to start peddling Kobe beef burgers for $10 a pop, bun included. As Kobe beef goes, that ain’t bad. $40 is not unheard of for a Kobe hamburger, and $100 or more for a Kobe steak is nothing to write home about, other than to write home for more money. Is Ruby’s 10-buck burger a Kobe beef first for Newport Beach? Not exactly. According to Dan Marcheano, Commanding General of the Arches, where the best of everything is everyday fare, his restaurant was the first to introduce Kobe beef hereabout in 1988, with a $125 Kobe steak. Wow. $125 for a steak. You could buy two tanks of gas for that, almost. The Arches stopped selling their Kobe steak long ago, but Dan wishes Ruby’s and their upscale burger well. “You take a shot and you make it up along the way,” Marcheano said. “We’re all in the same boat, trying to drag someone into the restaurant.”

When it comes to Kobe beef, those heart-stopping prices are as much for the mystique as the meat. The Hyogo ranchers are very secretive about how they raise their chubby charges, but Paris Hilton leads a tough life compared to the average Wagyu cow. They’re fed a special diet, including Japanese beer, sleep in special quarters, and get a regular massage with warm sake to relax them, which supposedly makes them even more tender.

Okay, fine. But here’s what I want to know. Whatever it’s made from, where did the whole hamburger thing come from in the first place? Ground meat has been around forever, which sounds unsanitary but is true. You can find references to ground meat, mostly beef and lamb, from ancient Rome and Greece and even earlier. The most likely ancestor to our burgers though is the Hamburg steak. Can you guess which German city that’s from? You are very smart.

But it’s a long way from Hamburg to hamburger, at least as we know it. The original Hamburg steak was shredded beef that was spiced and lightly smoked, shaped into a hard patty and eaten either grilled or uncooked. When the great wave of German immigrants arrived here in the 1800’s, they brought the dish with them and ads popped up for “steak cooked in the Hamburg style.”

There is an 1834 menu from Delmonico’s restaurant in New York City that lists a “hamburger steak,” for 10 cents, and there is an 1871 menu for the Clipper restaurant in San Fernando that lists a “Hamburg Beefsteak,” also 10 cents, as are the mutton chops and pig’s feet in batter. Yum. Pig’s feet in batter. Who’s hungry? Beyond that, things get fuzzy.

About 137 people claim to have invented the American hamburger, which means 136 of them are lying. Do you know where Seymour, Wisconsin is? Neither do I. But Seymour-ites claim that a man named Charlie Nagreen invented hamburgers at the Outagamie County Fair in Seymour in 1885. Just 15, Charlie was selling meatballs from a food stand at the fair that year. Everybody who tried Charlie’s meatballs really liked them, but very few people tried them.

Charlie was young but he wasn’t dumb and he quickly figured out that nobody wants to walk around a county fair trying to eat a meatball. The next day, he flattened his meatballs, placed them between two slices of bread and called them “hamburgers.” Nagreen became known as “Hamburger Charlie” and sold his burgers at the fair every year until his death in 1951. The rest, as they say, is you-know-what, except for the people in Akron, Ohio who say, “Outagamie my patoot.”

Akron-ites claim that it was definitely a Charlie who invented the hamburger, but not Charlie Nagreen. They say it was Charles Menches from Akron, who also worked the county fair circuit in the 1880’s along with his brother, Frank. The Menches specialty was sausage-patty sandwiches, but one day, at the Erie County Fair in Hamburg, New York, they ran out of pork. A local butcher was also out of fresh pork but suggested they try ground beef instead. The brothers grilled the patties as if they were pork and served them as sandwiches. When a customer asked what they were, the legend is that Frank looked at one of banners for the Hamburg fair and said, “It’s a hamburger.” One weird footnote to both stories: Charles Nagreen and Charles Menches both died in 1951.

That’s all very touching say the residents of Tulsa, Oklahoma, but those are just tall tales from city slickers. Tulsans claim that the first certified, verified hamburger -- with modern-day bun -- was served by Oscar Weber Bilby at a Fourth of July picnic in 1891, which became an annual event and soon attracted Oklahomans from far and wide, and Oklahoma is very far and wide.

The Bilby family swears that the hamburger pedigree is theirs because not only did Oscar flip the first one, but his wife, Fanny, made rounded homemade buns specifically for them. One hundred four years later, on April 13, 1995, Oklahoma Governor Frank Keating proclaimed that thanks to Oscar’s burgers and Fanny’s buns, the true birthplace of the hamburger on a bun was Tulsa, Oklahoma in 1891 -- to which the people of Seymour and Akron said, “Plllfffft.” Hang on. We’re almost done.

The folks in New Haven, Connecticut claim the hamburger was invented by Louis Lassin in 1900 at his New Haven luncheonette, Louis’ Lunch Wagon. Not true, say the people of the Lone Star State, who claim that a good ol’ boy named Fletch Davis invented the hamburger at his lunch counter in Athens, Texas. We’d need about a day and a half to get through all the others, but you get the point. Who invented the American burger? Nobody knows. But if Kobe beef is what you crave and a $10 burger doesn’t make you flinch, head for Ruby’s Diner. Like they say in Hamburg -- “domo arigato.”

I gotta go.dpt.08-buffa-CPhotoInfoBV1PI4AS20060402icrhmkkf(LA)