I am standing on a street corner in Osaka, at midnight, eating octopus balls, breaking open the freshly fried clouds of dough and nibbling tentatively on the nuclear hot tender chunks of tentacle within. Slathered in a thick, sweetly savoury, dark brown sauce and topped with katsuobushi (dried smoked tuna flakes), which literally dance in the steam of the dough, this is perhaps the perfect post-pub food. Except that Osakans don’t so much pub crawl as food crawl, and these takoyaki (one of the city’s classic fast foods) are a mere pit stop on what is rapidly becoming the most stomach-stretching and deliriously tasty evening of my life.
I came to Osaka because of Anton Ego. You remember – the coffin-faced restaurant critic of the movie Ratatouille. Rumour has it that Ego was inspired by the real-life restaurant critic of Le Figaro, Francois Simon. It was Simon who had told me to make sure I spent time in Japan’s third largest city during my journey through the country researching a book about Japanese food.
The Japanese may think of Osakans as crude and mercantile, and overseas tourists tend to shun its apparently featureless cityscape but, Simon had told me, it is the most exciting food city in the world. If I was serious about food, I really ought to check it out.
That first night’s food crawl offered the perfect introduction. I had met my hosts, a food TV producer called Hiroshi and a musician called Chiaki, both friends of a friend, outside the National Bunraku Theatre earlier that evening. Formal, slightly bashful greetings belied the liberated gluttony that would ensue and the evening continued gently enough with a visit to a depachika, or department store basement food hall – in this case Hankyu’s.
Japan’s depachika are easily a match for any of the best food stores in the world, with a staggering array of ingredients and foodstuffs, a large proportion of which are entirely alien to Westerners. I had never seen so many shades and textures of miso paste and the pickles were an intergalactic array of unidentifiable vegetables. You may be familiar with the £100 Yubari melons from Hokkaido, and here they were, displayed in gift boxes like Fabergé eggs, although, in truth, prices for most produce – including non-Yubari melons – were comparable to those in the West.
At our next stop, the city’s Kuromon market, housed, like much of the city’s retail space, in an endless covered arcade, my eye was caught by stalls selling Japanese beef absurdly marbled with fat, like raspberry ripple ice cream, and the luminously fresh seafood. By then I was feeling peckish – a very Osakan thing to feel.
Osakans are permanently peckish. This is a city with a mighty, impatient and insatiable appetite – they even have a local word to evoke this, kuidaore, which, Hiroshi explained, means ‘eating until you go bust’. My kinda town. (As it happened, it also turned out to be my children’s kind too.
One day, strolling on the main food drag, Dotomburi, we chanced upon the Bow Wow Relaxation of Dogs Gallery – a café where dogs roam freely for diners to pet. Ask them today and they will say this was the highlight of their entire three months in Japan.)
As a result, Osaka is the home of an impressive fast food double whammy: kaiten – conveyor belt – sushi and instant noodles were both invented here in the same epochal year, 1958. Mawaru Genroku Sushi eventually became a chain, and though its founder, Yoshiaki Shiraishi, lost much of his fortune after trying to replace the few staff he had with robots, the original restaurant remains, in the eastern part of the city.
Momofuku Ando, who invented instant noodles in his garden shed, went on to become a billionaire and a national hero in Japan. He died in 2007, but the slick Momofuku Ando Instant Ramen Museum – which looks a little like a contemporary art gallery – to the north of the city, is dedicated to his life and work.
