Food & Drink

Osaka Is a Food-Obsessed City Unlike Anywhere Else in Japan

The Japanese port city is more interested in fun than formality. 
Cond Nast Traveler Magazine December 2019 Osaka Urban Renegade
Jenny Zarins 

I'm hurtling through a course of neon-lit puddles in a sudden spring downpour. Blinking electronic signs blip out slogans about ramen, Asahi beer, and curiously amorphous octopus balls. With each sign reflected in the canal below, it feels like floating through a digital void. Giant animatronic crabs and dragons climb 12-story buildings. Smoke and steam rise off the sidewalk meat vendors, and directly in the path ahead are platoons of hungry folk armed with plaid umbrellas, bundles of shopping bags, and plates of food. Osaka's Dotonbori neighborhood can feel like a real-life video game.

Frenetic and disorderly, Osaka is not like Tokyo. It's wackier, edgier, and harder to categorize. It's also not like the rest of Japan. It was one of the first places in the country to legalize same-sex marriage and is the baseball capital and rumored headquarters of the yakuza, Japan's tattoo-covered mafia. It also remains the only place in left-oriented Japan to use the right-standing rule on escalators. I've traveled through most of Japan's 47 prefectures, but Osaka has always been a beguiling, confusing, and crowded nut to crack.

This near-impenetrability is partly why the sprawling, glowing, street-food hub is on the rise for travelers. Inbound tourism to Osaka surged fivefold between 2012 and 2017 and is now outpacing Tokyo. Renzo Piano's shiny airport, located in Osaka Bay, reopened last year after a typhoon forced it to close temporarily; it has new nonstops from London on British Airways and from Seattle on Delta (you fly into Osaka's Kansai airport to get to Kyoto, too, about an hour away). The city also has 97 Michelin stars, including four three-star restaurants.

The Tsutenkaku tower in Shinsekai

Jenny Zarins 

Moxy Osaka Honmachi

Jenny Zarins 

But it's more street food and less stiff dining that keeps the Dotonbori district packed with smartphone-yielding millennials on any given Friday. The city's most visited neighborhood delivers on the clichéd notion tourists have of a bright, hyper-vertical, crowded Japan, and I am grateful to be with an Osakan and guide, Ayako, who cuts through it all with the ease of a knife in butter. “I'm taking you to a very special kushikatsu restaurant for our first dinner,” she says, speeding ahead of me. Dinner, she lets me know, happens twice in Osaka, and she pulls me down a side alley away from the crowds scarfing okonomiyaki (savory pancakes), for our first of the night.

Tranquil and upscale, Shiruhisa Hozenji is a Showa-era den of kushikatsu, Osaka's famous fast food. The skewers of breaded and deep-fried vegetables, fish, and meat are served with raw cabbage to standing diners at hundreds of counters across the city and typically washed down with frosty mugs of beer instead of sake. This cozy brick-and-wood-paneled tavern has stained-glass windows and 15 counter seats, each laid with a copper tray and various homemade sauces and salts. Its chef, Shiruhisa-san, is known for his ornate kushikatsu twists, like prawns twined around fiddleheads, butterbur wrapped delicately in tofu, and shiso leaves with flaky whitefish. Among his most popular dishes is a dessert: a deep-fried strawberry enveloped in bitter matcha mochi, as elegant as it is delicious and a reminder that Osakan food can hold its own against Kyoto's graceful kaiseki and Tokyo's VIP sushi counters.

Reentering the city's bustle, with its jammed subway stations and throngs of visitors, is sobering after hours of katsu and sake. Still, pockets of Osaka can be tranquil, like Ukiyo Shoji, a serene back alley in Dotonbori strewn with red lanterns and tangled nests of telephone lines that's home to a street-art project depicting Osaka's merchant past. Here, I allow myself to relish Osaka's order, rather than its chaos, like the 17th-century Hozenji Temple, a shrine housing Fudo Myo-o, a Buddhist deity of self-discipline, covered in a thick coating of moss, made greener by the pilgrims who splash cupfuls of water over it as they pass by. Then, while gazing at the view, my stomach grumbles for dinner number two. Leaning against the gyoza takeout counter of Ramen Todai Dotonbori, a Tokushima-style ramen shop, I tune out the noise and neon and narrow my focus on a small halved green sudachi (Japanese citrus), which I squeeze onto my paper plate of crispy, golden, and delightfully oily gyoza. In Osaka, tranquility is a state of mind.

Travel guidebooks and articles often recycle the same old Osaka intel. They focus on the city's purported nickname Tenka no Daidokoro (“the nation's kitchen”) and wax poetic about its culture of kuidaore, often translated as “eat until you drop.” They make the same rote observations that Osaka is friendlier than Tokyo, less rigid than Kyoto, and home to Japan's fastest walkers, cheapest food, and seediest neighborhoods. They fail to mention that Osaka is more of an Asian city than a Japanese one and home to Japan's third-largest population of foreigners. This includes the Zainichi Kankokujin (Korean immigrants living in Japan), who live mainly in the Ikuno ward district of Tsuruhashi, which is more than 20 percent Korean, a lofty figure for low-immigrant Japan. The city is also wildly popular with Taiwanese, Chinese, and Thai visitors. Osaka is not known for its relaxing onsen or graceful tatami-floored ryokan. Chopsticks are rarely used here. Whatever the rest of Japan is defined by, Osaka seems to be the opposite. To appreciate it you need to chuck the book of Japan's outdated etiquette rules out the window.

A view from the Conrad hotel

Jenny Zarins 

Jessy's Coffee Shop in Nishi Ward

Jenny Zarins 

And doing so can be intimidating. Beyond Dotonbori the city sprawls across the plains of the Yodo River estuary, surrounded entirely by mountains. The crescent-shaped metropolitan area, its own special urban prefecture, home to over 20 million, is physically larger than Paris and Manhattan but significantly smaller than Tokyo or Shanghai. Geographically the city is divided into the northern Kita and the southern Minami districts and further subdivided into 24 ku (wards). Running through it all are the Dojima and Tosabori rivers and the famous Dotonbori canal. Like Tokyo, this is a major port city, but visitors seldom see the port, let alone the ocean. A former rice-trading and black-market hub, Osaka is relentlessly urban and turned its back on nature about 20 years ago. A few hard-fought parks and gardens take the edge off its concrete assault.

This gritty urbanity is a hot topic the next day when I meet with fellow Japanophile Mandy Wong, who moved to Osaka from Colorado to pursue a teaching certificate. We do lunch at Matsuba Sohonten, a rowdy, fluorescent-lit kushikatsu joint that is equal parts Madrid marisquería and Irish tavern, with cigarette butts and napkins on the floor. Mandy shouts out orders of shiitake, quail's egg, and prawns to the surly staff, while we squeeze aside regulars to down mouthfuls without even removing our winter coats. “This is how Osakans really eat,” Mandy says, dipping a chunk of crispy fried lotus root into a metallic vat of inky brown sauce under a sign that reads “No double dipping!” in hiragana, a style of Japanese lettering.

A shop front on Tachibana-dori (Orange Street)

Jenny Zarins 

Barbecue at Robatayaki Mizukake Chaya

Jenny Zarins 

Over frosty Asahi, Mandy and I lament how Japanese etiquette is misinterpreted, and we commiserate over the regurgitated myths that linger, like how vegetarians will not have any eating options in Japan due to the ubiquitousness of dashi (not true!). Or how waving chopsticks is rude. (Technically it's disrespectful, not rude—but rubbing chopsticks together before the meal is.) While praising the merits of Japanese ice cream, we treat ourselves to a cremia soft serve, a high-fat ice cream made with Hokkaido milk served in a buttery langue de chat cone in flavors like seaweed dust and cherry blossom, topped with sprinkles and freeze-dried strawberries. Later that evening we check out some bars like Salon de Amanto, a wood-clad loft inside a 120-year-old house whose relaxed bar is manned by a rotating cast of Osaka artists. “The word or the concept of a hipster doesn't really exist in Osaka... or Japan for that matter,” Mandy says as we exit NonCommittal, one of many curated retail shops on Tachibana-dori (Orange Street), a row of boutiques that could have been transplanted from Williamsburg or Berlin, selling faded mom jeans and felt lumberjack hats. “Being authentic here is more important than being stylish.”

Nearby we settle around a tabletop grill for some barbecue. Shoes off, sake poured, Mandy asks for the choicest cuts of Japanese beef, and the waiter fires up the charcoal. “What's the biggest difference between Tokyo and Osaka?” I ask. With her gaze fixed on a silky piece of tender Kobe tongue that she gingerly flips over, she answers, “Tokyoites have a more top-down, hierarchical approach to things. Osakans are down-to-earth and see each other as equals. We just want to eat and have a good time.”

Osaka's distinctions are obvious to those who've traveled often to other parts of the country. When I was puzzled by the vending machine system at Torisoba Zagin Niboshi, a noodle shop specializing in creamy ramens, the no-nonsense waitress walked outside and showed me how to operate it without any of the giggling or bowing that a gaijin like me might be subjected to elsewhere in Japan. On a previous visit I found myself stuck in Osaka late one night after an accident on the Shinkansen tracks caused all trains to be canceled. Exhausted, I plopped down at an izakaya counter and used Google Translate to explain the situation to my server over plates of simmered eggplant and crispy karage, and probably one too many sake. She looked at me sympathetically but also cautiously, as if to say, “Too much information, dude.”

Even the architecture can be jarring... at first. Nakanoshima, an urban knot of an island in the heart of the central business district that is covered by expressway overpasses, skyscrapers, alleys, and wharf-like shanties, is a good representation of Osaka's anything-goes development mentality. It's long on concrete and short on green, and offers no cohesive style, forcing your eye to take in ever uglier buildings. There is a park to the east of Nakanoshima that is home to Osaka Castle, a five-tiered, 16th-century pagoda glittering with gold, though it is surrounded by so many gardens, moats, and gates that I can't see it until I start climbing its ramparts. I spend an evening exploring rapidly gentrifying Tennoji, future home to new brand Omo, the latest property from cult hotel company Hoshino Resorts (it opens in 2022), but for now known for its Tsutenkaku tower, seedy karaoke joints, and window-dwelling prostitutes who are heavily painted but hide coquettishly behind mirrors when you walk by. I see all the things that Japan doesn't want to be known for: cyclists riding the wrong way on pedestrian sidewalks, garbage on the streets, homeless people in cardboard boxes, and even a punky old woman with pink hair shouting out fortunes. Osaka is a great antidote to Japan's sometimes overly antiseptic ambience. Few here have affectations. Few are afraid to show emotion. Because of that, there's a certain honesty to Osakans, who've asked the hard questions others in Japan are too proud to utter.

At KIX airport I pop into the homey-looking kappogi for one last meal. The kerchiefed mama-san behind the counter brings me plates of chicken wings, cucumber chunks splashed with sesame oil, sautéed golden curls of pork topped with scallions, and crunchy panko-breaded deep-fried oysters, all surprisingly affordable and excellent. While I nibble, the space fills with luggage-totting salarymen, who roll up their sleeves, knock back inordinate amounts of sake, and carry on boisterously as multiple plates crowd their tables. At the end of their meals, sleeves rolled back down, suit jackets rebuttoned, they head to their individual gates, leaving Osaka like nothing had happened, but with a stagger, a full belly, and a grin on their face like so many before them.

Matsuba Sohonten restaurant

Jenny Zarins 

A sign at Moxy Osaka Honmachi hotel

Jenny Zarins 

Where to stay and eat in Osaka

Eight-story midrange Hotel the Grandee has large beds and Toto bidets and is located in a quiet, strollable stretch of Namba, the city's entertainment district. Room 711 has walls carpeted with plants. Breakfast—not to be missed—includes house-made soups, salads, and pickled burdock. From $150

In the nearly decade-old St. Regis Osaka, occupying the top 16 floors of a Namba skyscraper, the 160 rooms have soaking tubs, butler boxes, velvet sofas, and floor-to-ceiling windows. The raked gravel rooftop garden offers views of verdant Mount Ikoma and provides a sanctuary from Osaka's urban crunch below. A 24/7 gym and 3,821-square-foot spa help burn off the inevitable Osaka weight gain. From $370

The 155-room Moxy Osaka Honmachi, which opened in March 2018, takes up a former undergarment warehouse in the trending Honmachi district and is surrounded by izakaya and kushikatsu joints. Its industrial-chic decor, which includes exposed brick walls and white subway tiles, was designed by Yabu Pushelberg and executed by local firm Wise Labo. Neither the round-the-clock gym nor the lobby DJ can be heard from the quiet rooms. From $100

At Matsuba Sohonten, a scruffy kushikastu in a warren underneath Shin-Osaka train station, crowds of busy Osakans file in for fast and furiously fried skewers, washed down with cold beer.

Head to Shiruhisa Hozenji, a dimly lit food den, for breaded, deep-fried meat and vegetable skewers inside a space with simple white wooden walls. **

Torisoba Zagin is an upmarket ramen bar with a vending machine ordering system outside. One specialty is the steaming chicken-mushroom-and-burdock ramen served in big bowls atop an elongated wooden bar.

InsideJapan Tours, a chapter of Inside Travel Group, offers several types of tours across Japan and specializes in guides with a specific set of on-the-ground knowledge.

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