Kiwi food YouTubers Thomas & Sheena Southam are on an eternal quest to find the most delicious local food the world has to offer. This week, they check out the best bites in Osaka.
When a city uses the term kuidaore - eat until you drop - to describe its food culture, you know you're in for a good time. Osaka's identity is intrinsically linked to food. This port city, on Japan's largest island, Honshu, is known as Tenka no Daidokoro, The Nation's Kitchen. Historically, because Osaka produced most of Japan's rice; more recently because of its reputation as one of the country's food capitals. The list of things to eat is impossibly long but here are a few of our favourites to get you started...
1. Okonomiyaki at Mizuno
A mish-mash of flavours and textures, okonomiyaki, perhaps Osaka's most famous dish, is comfort food at its finest. At family run Mizuno this savoury pancake-esque dish is assembled in front of you: cabbage, pork and often seafood is added to a flour, egg and yam batter and then cooked on the grill before being painted with sticky okonomiyaki sauce (think a sweetened Worcestershire sauce), squirted with mayonnaise and sprinkled with seaweed flakes. Immerse yourself even further into the dining experience by grabbing your spatula and carving up your okonomiyaki to eat directly off the grill. To up the okonomiyaki ante, we suggest adding soba noodles to your order. They'll add an irresistible chewy, crisp texture to the dish.
Eat it at Mizuno, 1-4-15 Dotombori, Chuo-ku, Osaka 542-0071. Open seven days, 11am-10pm.
