Rice, Noodle, Fish (9 page)

(Michael Magers, lead photographer)

Emiko is plump and ornery and wears the decades of gyoza making like vets wear war on their bodies. “I've been doing this for sixty-two years, feeding lines around the block,” she says.

She must really love dumplings, I suggest rather lamely.

“Not at all. I don't really like gyoza.”

Exhausted from the march down memory lane, she takes a seat with us at the table and watches intently while four of us try to make 150 dumplings disappear. Every time I put my chopsticks down, she touches my arm and motions for me to keep going. “Eat! Eat!” Nobody at the table wants to let her down, least of all me, but I don't know how to tell her that this is the fifth stop of the night, that my belly is filled with cow stomach and daikon spaghetti and the warm, mysterious pleasures of a city I'm falling hard for, so instead I just keep eating.

米 麺 魚

On my first morning in Osaka, I see the strangest thing: a man jaywalking. In fact, not just one man, but men and women and young students, crossing side streets and central avenues under the red glow of a stoplight. This might be typical urban behavior in most corners of the world, but jaywalking in Japan is snow-leopard rare. Even in Tokyo, in the small, fuzzy hours of the morning, call girls and yakuza toughs will patiently wait at the city's tiniest, least-traveled intersection for the green light to tell them when to go.

出る杭は打たれる—“The nail that sticks up will be hammered down”—goes one popular Japanese proverb.
Japan is a paragon of order and civil obedience. There are parts of Japanese society so polished, they make Switzerland and Scandinavia look sloppy by comparison. In most regards, this is a glorious virtue: trains are scheduled down to the nanosecond, streets are so clean you can see your reflection in the pavement, and crime—especially violent crime—is all but nonexistent. But for those of us who like our punctual trains with a dash of disorder, Japan can feel stifling.

Osaka understands this. Its guiding proverb has a decidedly more defiant tone: 十人十色: “Ten persons, ten colors.” Here the ubiquitous and homogenous spiffiness (some might say stiffness) that defines so much of Japan gives way to a more diverse and familiar tapestry of rich and poor, clean and dirty, highbrow and low. Even by Japanese standards, this is a massive city, with more than 19 million inhabitants in greater Osaka. The guidebooks aren't wrong; Osaka is not a textbook beautiful city. Not a seamless stretch of civilization, but a patchwork of skyscrapers and smokestacks, Gucci and ghettos, that better approximates life as most of us know it.

With all of this in mind, it's not surprising that Osaka is a center of casual food culture. Its two most famous foods,
okonomiyaki
(a thick, savory pancake stuffed with all manners of flora and fauna) and
takoyaki
(a golf-ball-sized fritter with a single chewy nugget of octopus deposited at its molten core), are the kind of carby, fatty, belly-padding drinking food that can sustain a city with Osaka's voracious appetite for mischief. You'll find plenty of both all over the city, but especially at the street food stalls that dot the electric streets of Dotonbori, Osaka's central entertainment district, a high-voltage maze of karaoke bars, gentlemen's clubs, and cheap calories, all punctuated by packs of giant metal animals—dragons, crabs, blowfish—that keep watch over the frothing masses. I've ended more than a few Suntory-soaked Osaka nights
there at the elbow of a
takoyaki
cook, that selfless citizen who works tirelessly browning octopus-stuffed batter so that individuals like me might sleep a bit better at night.

But nothing in Osaka is as precious as stomach real estate, and one would be wise to save plenty of space for the city's less-obvious delights. To find the best of Osaka's street eats, you must venture farther afield. Shinsekai is an area known for its rough edges, a once-glorious neighborhood modeled after New York and Paris that became a bastion of seediness and criminal activity in the lean postwar years. But beyond the hucksters and the hustlers, the pachinko parlors and the prostitutes, you will find what you need:
kushikatsu
, tiny skewers of deep-fried meat and vegetables that were invented on these streets. Osaka is lousy with restaurants that have taken the
kushi
concept, cleaned it up, and marked up the price 500 percent, but that's not what you're after. You want your stick fix here in Shinsekai, where
kushi
shops line the streets, and with them groups of old couples and construction workers looking for grease. People will proclaim one establishment's superiority over another, but when it comes to fried meat, it's best not to overthink it.

We find a space at the bar of one of three dozen nearly identical establishments and rattle off an order that surprises even the double-fisting plumbers to our left. A meat marathon ensues. Two old guys behind the counter run through the paces, the first doing the three-step shuffle (flour, egg wash, panko bread crumbs), the second working the fryer like a North Carolina line cook. On the counter, a sign lays out the only true rule of the
kushikatsu
: no double dipping. Drop your stick into the thick Worcestershire-like sauce once and be done with it.

The sticks come flying out of the grease, golden and glistening. They taste exactly as they should, of salt and crunch and a general meaty savoriness.
A wedge of raw cabbage is offered as a breath mint of sorts, but in this bar at least, vegetables are a lonely bunch.

The longer we linger, the more the sharp edges of Shinsekai soften. After another round of
kushikatsu
, the oily residue that hangs over this part of town feels like aromatherapy; the electric patter of pachinko begins to sound like Kenny G. By the time we wander back toward downtown Osaka, I'm convinced the most dangerous move you can make in this neighborhood is the double dip.

But you won't find Osaka's most quintessential eating experience under the menacing glare of a local thug in Shinsekai or next to a giant mechanized crab in Dotonbori. You'll find it on an unsuspecting street a few hundred meters from Kyobashi Station, at what looks more like a garage sale or a homeless enclave than a dining establishment. Nothing about Toyo makes sense: the kitchen is housed in the back of a pickup truck, the tables are made from stacks of yellow Asahi crates, and the hours are as erratic as the decor. But come most days after 4:00 p.m. and you will find a line of young Osakans clutching briefcases and fingering iPhones, eager to take in the Toyo
tachinomi
experience.

Look alive! You will never find a better perch from which to take in the dramatic transformation of the postwork Japanese. It takes place every evening between approximately five and six in cities across Japan, as salarymen and women emerge from gleaming steel structures that hold them captive during daylight hours and beeline it to the closest izakaya to eat and drink away the sting of the workday. The same people who stood so quietly, so tensely in line behind you, soon grow animated. Ties are loosened, hair let down, and
kanpai
s ring out in spirited choruses as rank and order dissolve with each passing sip. From soba to miso to raw-tuna red, the most aggressive transformers wear the stages of devolution on their faces. You want to be near this; this is the Japan that runs antithetical to the
one you have constructed in your head. This is the beauty of Japan: it builds a set of beliefs and perceptions during the day, only to destroy them once the sun goes down. Rigid? Reserved? Formal? Find a table, fill it with food and beer and new friends, and watch as all those stiff postures slacken.

Fueling this metamorphosis is Toyo-san, chef and owner of this beautiful mess, a short, muscular man in his late sixties with a shiny bald head and wildfire in his eyes. He holds forth at the stovetop with a towel wrapped around his neck like a prizefighter, a lit cigarette dangling from his lips and a full-blast blowtorch in his hand. Toyo trades in extremes. Half the food that he sends out is raw: ruby cubes of tuna dressed with a heaping mound of fresh wasabi; sea grapes the size of ball bearings that pop like caviar against the roof of your mouth; glistening beads of salmon roe meant to be stuffed into crispy sheets of nori.

The other half gets the blowtorch treatment. Tuna is transformed into a sort of tataki stir-fry, toasted, glazed with ponzu, and tossed with a thicket of spring onions. Fish heads are blitzed under the flame until the cheeks singe and the skin screams and the eyes melt into a glorious stew meant to be extracted with chopsticks. Even sea urchin, those soft orange tongues of ocean umami, with a sweetness so subtle that cooking it is considered heretical in most culinary circles, gets blasted like a crème brûlée by Toyo and his ring of fire.

From spanking raw to burning inferno and back again, he cooks like a man possessed by some gnawing gastronomic schizophrenia. Every so often he looks up and gives wide-eyed onlookers an enthusiastic thumbs-up, but mostly he keeps to his food and his flame, laughing softly to himself at something we'll never understand. In some corners of Japan's culinary world, where restaurants have roofs and ingredients come with responsibilities, he might be crucified for his blatant disregard for convention and basic decorum, but in Osaka, where eating is a sport and rules are made to be blowtorched, Toyo-san is a hero.

Toyo-san and his flaming tuna, icons of Osaka

(Michael Magers, lead photographer)

米 麺 魚

That's not to say Osaka doesn't dress up. After all, this is a city with more boutiques than Paris and more Michelin stars than New York. But even the high-end stuff in Osaka exudes the warm, inviting, you're-here-to-have-fun-not-whisper-to-your-waiter vibe that you find at more everyday establishments.

At the heart of this ethos is
kappo
, counter-style dining wherein the line between chef and guest is all but dissolved entirely. Chefs talk about the menu, take orders, cook inches from your face, and reach across the counter to serve you dinner. If this sounds familiar, it's because many of the best restaurants in the world right now—Momofuku Ko in New York, L'Atelier de Joel Robuchon in Paris—model themselves after Osaka
kappo
.

You'll find the counter philosophy expressed in a variety of styles across Osaka. Kigawa is the city's
kappo
nerve center, the birthplace of modern
kappo
and still the breeding ground for many of the city's best young chefs. The menu offers a hundred different dishes, all heavily tied to the seasons, all built with the best of Osakan raw materials. At Kahala, a favorite of brand-name Western chefs, Yoshifumi Mori serves an eight-course showcase of expensive, obscure local ingredients that concludes with a five-layer mille-feuille of rare beef and fresh wasabi. And at Yamagata, the chef turns his counter intelligence into a treatise on Kansai beef, a
horumon
-inspired showcase of the entire sacred cow: heart sashimi with charred edamame, grilled tongue coated in mushroom miso, and a four-ounce square of tenderloin sauced with barrel-aged soy and fresh
sansho
peppercorns.

But my favorite
kappo
, one of the purest expressions of Osaka-style counter eating, is found down a narrow alleyway just a few blocks removed from the
madness of Dotonbori. When you walk into Wayoyuzen Nakamura, the first thing you'll see is Nakamura-san himself standing firmly behind the counter, smiling broadly and bowing as you take your seat. He'll talk to you, ask you about your day, probe the dimensions of your hunger, discuss at length your hopes and fears.

“I can tell right away by looking at you what you want to eat,” he says. “I can tell you how many brothers and sisters you have.”

After divining my favorite color (blue) and my astrological sign (Aquarius), Nakamura pulls out an ivory stalk of
takenoko
, fresh young bamboo ubiquitous in Japan during the spring. “This came in this morning from Kagumi. It's so sweet that you can eat it raw.” He peels off the outer layer, cuts a thin slice, and passes it across the counter.