Ikegami eyes the second helping on my plate and gently reminds me, “We have a lot more to eat.” The Netflix-famous Izakaya Toyo’s blowtorched tuna cheeks, which make for good TV but butane-flavoured tuna my meal is saved by chain-smoking chef-owner Toyoji Chikumoto’s zany showmanship and his chutoro maki rolled up as casually as a yoga mat with gutsy tears of shiso.Īdd too much okonomiyaki to the list. Osakans dine with athletic fervour and passion, and everyone I meet wants to know - demands to know, really - the same thing: “What have you eaten?” I tell them: Two syllables cannot encompass the diversity and quality of the cooking, from hot and saucy takoyaki on the street to tradition-steeped kaiseki at the Michelin-starred Nishitenma Nakamura, where chef-owner Akemi Nakamura tenderises squid sashimi with knife strokes as delicate as calligraphy. You can’t just call Japan’s third-largest city a food town. Singapore, Japan Among The Top 10 Safest Countries In The World A guide to eating and drinking at the best places in Osaka From left: Masuhiro “Julian” Yokota at his bakery, Yotsubashi Pain cycling in Minamisenba, a popular shopping neighbourhood | Image Credit: Andrea Fazzari Over the next 20 minutes, she periodically reappears to add shrimp, steak, and pork flip the pancake and paint it with mayo and a sweet, tangy brown sauce fry up a sunny-side egg to slide on top and finally, bury it all in dancing bonito flakes. With the muscle memory and blasé demeanour of someone who has done this ten thousand times, our server dumps a bowl of shaved cabbage and batter onto the hot, hissing grill built into our table. Seated by a rain-lashed window, my guide, Noriyuki Ikegami, and I are safe inside Tsuruhashi Fugetsu, a chain specialising in another Osakan treasure, okonomiyaki. Ursula-san already clutches takoyaki (octopus fritters) and kushikatsu (deep-fried skewers) in her white-suckered tentacles but, unsurprisingly for a native Osakan, she’s still hungry.īetween us is a checkerboard lane and a monsoon. She lords over the second floor of a restaurant in Osaka’s Shinsekai quarter, a pastiche of Paris and Coney Island erected in the early 1900s, neglected by the midcentury and respected today for its retro-futurist architecture and first-class fast food.
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