There are at least a dozen very good reasons why author and blogger Michael Booth rates Osaka number one. Which city would you rate your gourmet great?
Simple question: what’s the most greatest, most exciting, most dynamic food city in the world today, the culinary It City of our age?
Paris is past it (going to a restaurant shouldn’t be like going to church). London isn’t quite there yet (where’s the street food?). Hanoi, Bangkok, Hong Kong, Shanghai and most major Indian cities will all have their advocates, but is the refinement there? New York is always going to be in with a shout but its great strength is its immigrant cuisines: it lacks an indigenous food culture. Sydney is stuck in the 90s, Lyon in the 1890s, and, as far as I’m concerned, to be a real contender the food roots have to go deep, so that rules out places like Vegas and Cape Town. The market’s nice, but I’ve never had a good meal in Barcelona and though Copenhagen may be flavour of the month, a couple of good restaurants do not a global food capital make.
At the risk of alerting John Crace, I have a new book out, ‘Sushi and Beyond – What the Japanese Know About Food‘. So you’d probably expect me to go with a Japanese city, but it’s not Tokyo or Kyoto that I pine for on a daily basis, but Japan’s often overlooked third city, Osaka.
I originally went to Osaka on the recommendation of Anton Ego – the restaurant critic in Ratatouille (or rather François Simon of Le Figaro, on whom, rumour has it, Ego was based). I interviewed him a few years back for one of those ‘Can Paris Still Cut the Mustard?’ type pieces (answer – ‘no’) and was surprised to hear this most chauvinistic of food writers dismiss my adopted home city out of hand, and plump for Osaka instead.
I booked my flight soon after and found a city fit to burst with incredible places to eat, from the dazzling depichika basement food halls (the greatest food shows on earth), to the exuberant restaurant quarter of Dotonbori, to the top end places like Kahala, a tiny, exclusive counter restaurant beloved of Tetsuya Wakada.
This is a city entirely at ease with its culinary identity but open to foreign influences (in this case, largely Korean), with several unique dishes, and a population possessed of an admirable gluttony for life. They even have a word for their insatiable gluttony, ‘kuidaore’, meaning ‘eat until you burst / go bust’.
The city has an irresistible triumvirate of highly addictive, indigenous fast foods: okonomiyaki (thick, filled pancakes, made with yam flour batter, seafood, pork and kimchi); tako yaki (octopus doughnuts); and kushikatsu (deep fried, breaded skewers – invented at the restaurant Daruma, and much loved by Ferran Adrià , so the chef there told me), each of them slathered in a sweet, savoury, mahogany-coloured sauce. And let’s not forget that kaiten sushi and instant ramen noodles were both invented in the city in the same epochal year (1958 – the latter are rather better than Pot Noodles, I should add).
This is also where you’ll find the world’s greatest (largest, most expensive, best equipped, toughest etc) cooking school, the Tsuji Culinary Institute; and a fish and produce market to rival Tsukiji.
Beat that, Ludlow.
So, I’ve nailed my culinary colours to the mast. Which city would you rate your gourmet great?