12/15/12

Japanese Food (a la Osaka)

With regards to travel Japan is an amazing place; beautiful and tranquil with a very unique and progressive culture. But at this point in my life I much prefer cycling countries like China, Indonesia and Vietnam because they are cheaper and offer much more in terms of adventure and excitement. My first 40 days in Japan I was on such a tight budget that I ate only at supermarkets and my diet was mostly made up of fruit and rice...until my mate Jon met up with me in Osaka, at which point he and I went nuts and ate everything we could and Japan became possibly my favorite food country on earth...

I've divided this post into 5 sections:
Street snacks and diners
Noodles
Okonomi-yaki
Shabu shabu
Sushi
Street snacks and diners - On the cheaper (but still expensive) side of things there is a ton of street food on offer all over Osaka where a typical meal is around $4-$7 with sit down diners costing slightly more.
Tako-yaki (octopus balls) is definitely the most famous street food in Osaka




The batter forms balls around chunks of octopus as they cook

The finished product is covered with a spicy bbq sauce, mayo, and dried fish flakes

Seaweed ice cream

Gyoza (fried dumplings)

Street pancakes made from egg
 
  
The best late night meal that a drunk person could ever ask for: a big raw steak with pepper and butter sizzzzzling on a hot cast iron pan

Noodles - Hot bowls of noodles on a cold November day are extremely pleasurable
Soba

Udon

Ramen

More ramen

Okonomi-yaki -These 'pancakes' are made of a batter with rice and various kinds of stuffings, pretty much anything you can think of can be put into these things, and then they are cooked on a hot griddle in the middle of your table. The Japanese seem to love restaurants that have a 'hands on' aspect to the meal, meaning that you cook it yourself at your table, which I really like.
Batter and slabs of bacon go on the grill

covered with various sauces..

...and a thin mayo..

..and finished with more sauces and fish flakes

cheese doing what it does best: oozing

Shabu shabu - One of the best meals of my life. All you can eat raw beef and pork, which is dipped quickly in a simmering broth and then into a citrus soy sauce, and all you can drink beer/sake/plum wine for about $60/person. I wouldn't be surprised if this particular restaurant decided to revoke it's all-you-can options after me mate and I ate 10 plates of meat and drank about 20 drinks in 1.5 hours. 
Preparing to devour a massive meal

Jon Doig pictured here with a beer, a cigarette, and chopsticks full of thinly sliced pork. He would be a pretty shitty Muslim,  but an ideal dining buddy

Oh yeah

Sushi - My favorite of all, you sit in long narrow restaurants and small plates of sushi slowly pass by you on conveyor belts with each plate costing about $1.50, Jonni and I averaged well over 30 plates per meal and were quite proud of our 'stacks' which serve as concrete evidence to the other patrons of the restaurant, as well as the employees, that we don't f#$% around.