Where to eat in Osaka without queueing for two hours

It also has a problem, which is that a handful of its restaurants have become internationally famous, and the queues outside them now run to two hours for food that is good rather than transcendent. Meanwhile, four hundred yards away, a counter with nine seats and no English sign serves something better with a table free at 12.15.

This article is about how to be in the second group. The techniques are not secret, but they are not obvious either, and they work across Japan rather than only here.

The single most useful thing: eat lunch at the dinner restaurant

If you take one thing from this article, take this.

At a serious Japanese restaurant, lunch and dinner come out of the same kitchen, with the same chef, using the same produce delivered the same morning. Lunch is a shorter set menu with fewer courses. It costs between a third and a half of dinner. And it is very often available on the day, or a few days ahead, at a restaurant whose dinner service is booked out for two months.

A kappo counter in Osaka that serves a $180 dinner will frequently serve a $50 lunch. A sushi counter charging $250 in the evening does a lunch omakase for $70. The difference is course count and a little theatre, not quality.

The practical consequence is that you can eat at three or four of the best restaurants in Osaka over a three-day visit, at lunch, for less than the price of one famous dinner and with none of the booking difficulty. We build itineraries around this deliberately: a big lunch, a light afternoon, an informal dinner. It is also, incidentally, a better way to eat, because a fourteen-course kaiseki at 8pm followed by a 7am train is not a pleasure.

Book lunch the same way you would book dinner. It is just far easier to get.

The depachika, which is the other answer

Under every large Japanese department store there is a food hall, called a depachika. Under Hankyu and Daimaru in Umeda, and under Takashimaya in Namba, are some of the best casual eating in the country, and almost no English-language guide mentions them.

What is down there: counters run by individual specialists, each doing one thing. Grilled eel. Tempura. Fifty kinds of pickles. A tonkatsu counter. Sushi cut to order. Wagyu croquettes. A pâtissier who trained in Lyon. Bento assembled to a standard that would be a sit-down meal anywhere else.

How to use it:

• Go around 6pm and buy dinner to take back to the hotel. This is what Japanese office workers do and it is a genuinely excellent meal for $12 to $20.
• Go after 7.30pm and the same counters start marking down, often by 30 to 50 percent, because almost nothing is held to the next day.
• Do not try to eat it in the hall. There is nowhere to sit, and that is not what the space is for.
• The basement below the basement, or the top floor, usually has restaurants with seating. The top floor restaurant decks of Japanese department stores are reliably good and never full.

For a family, or for anyone tired of restaurants after ten days, the depachika solves the evening completely. It is also the best souvenir shopping in Japan.

The districts, and what to eat in each

Dotonbori. The neon, the running man sign, the giant crab. Go once, at night, look at it, take the photograph, and eat somewhere else. The takoyaki and okonomiyaki stalls directly on the strip are aimed at visitors and priced accordingly. This is not snobbery, it is just true.

Namba and Sennichimae, one street back. The moment you leave Dotonbori by a side street, prices fall by a third and quality rises. Hozenji Yokocho, a lantern-lit stone alley two minutes from the crowds, has small kappo restaurants and old kushikatsu counters. Ura-Namba, the grid of streets north-east of the station, is where Osakans actually drink and eat, and it is full of standing bars and eight-seat izakaya.

Shinsekai. Kushikatsu, deep-fried skewers, and the famous rule about not double-dipping in the communal sauce. Scruffy, cheap, fun, and a completely different Osaka from the polished centre.

Kitashinchi, north of the river. The serious district. This is where the kappo counters, the sushi and the expensive dinners are, in a grid of small buildings with restaurants stacked six floors high. Almost nothing has a street-level sign. This is the area where a local phone call makes the difference between eating well and walking past.

Fukushima. One stop west of Umeda and the district we send people to most often now. Dense with small, ambitious, reasonably priced restaurants, popular with Osakans in their thirties, and largely undiscovered by foreign visitors.

Kuromon Ichiba market. Historically the kitchen of Osaka, now heavily oriented toward visitors, with the prices to match. Go early in the morning for the atmosphere and the produce. Do not eat a $30 plate of sliced scallops standing up.

Tsuruhashi. The Korean quarter, a genuine neighbourhood built around the market by the station, and the best yakiniku in western Japan. Worth the twelve-minute train.

What Osaka actually specialises in

• Okonomiyaki. A savoury cabbage pancake cooked on a hotplate. Osaka’s version mixes everything together, unlike Hiroshima’s layered one. Eat it at a counter where the cook does it in front of you.
• Takoyaki. Octopus balls, and the good ones are molten inside. Buy from a stall with a queue of locals rather than one with a photograph menu.
• Kushikatsu. Skewered, breaded, deep-fried anything. One communal sauce pot per table. Dip once, never twice.
• Kappo. The real reason to eat in Osaka. A counter, a chef, a set sequence of dishes, and a conversation. Less formal than kaiseki, more improvised, and often better.
• Kitsune udon and hakozushi. Both invented here. Quiet, old, cheap, and a good antidote to a week of rich food.

How reservations actually work

This is where visitors lose the most, so it is worth being specific.

Most good small restaurants do not take online bookings. They take a phone call, in Japanese, to a person who is also cooking. Many use a Japanese reservation platform that requires a Japanese mobile number to complete a booking, which a visitor does not have. Some accept bookings only from a hotel concierge. Some take them only from existing customers or by introduction.

The thirty-day rule. A great many counters open their books exactly thirty days ahead, at a specific hour, and fill within minutes. If you want a specific counter, the call has to be made on the right morning. This is not something you can do from another time zone with a phrasebook.

Why a Japanese phone number matters. It is not bureaucracy. A restaurant with nine seats loses a fifth of its revenue to a no-show, and a local number is the only leverage it has. A booking made from a Japanese number by someone who can be called back is treated completely differently from a web form filled in from abroad.

This is the most concrete thing our Tokyo office does for clients. We make the calls, in Japanese, on the day the books open, from a Japanese number, and we confirm the day before. We also brief the restaurant on dietary requirements in writing, in Japanese, which is the only way that reliably works. Vegetarian is harder in Japan than most visitors expect, because dashi, a fish stock, is in almost everything.

What you can do yourself: hotel concierges at good hotels can and will book, if you ask on arrival rather than on the night. Lunch is far easier than dinner everywhere. And walking in at 11.45am, before opening, at a place with a queue at 1pm, works more often than people think.

A three-day eating shape that works

Day one. Depachika dinner on arrival, because you are tired and it is 200 yards from the station. Walk Dotonbori afterwards for the lights.

Day two. A serious kappo or sushi lunch, booked. Afternoon at Osaka Castle or the Nakanoshima museums. Evening standing bars in Ura-Namba, three or four small places rather than one dinner.

Day three. Kuromon market early, okonomiyaki at a counter for lunch, an afternoon train to Nara or Kobe, and yakiniku in Tsuruhashi in the evening.

Two nights in Osaka is enough for most trips. Three if food is the point of the holiday, which is how we build food and culture in 13 days. Osaka is also twenty-eight minutes from Kyoto, so plenty of clients stay in Kyoto and come here to eat, which works perfectly well.

Prices quoted here are guidance and move with the season and the exchange rate. We confirm current menu prices when we book. For the full picture, see what two weeks in Japan really costs.

Plan this trip

Tell us how you like to eat and a Japan specialist will build the days around it, and our Tokyo office will make the calls that need a Japanese phone number. The first outline is free and carries no obligation.

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Keep reading

• Japan: the complete guide to planning your trip
• Tokyo in four days, by neighbourhood rather than by sight
• How much does two weeks in Japan really cost?
• Ryokan etiquette, without the anxiety
• Food and culture in Japan, 13 days
• All our Japan trips

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