This type of street is in my memory of Osaka of the early 60’s – just across the bay from Osaka is Kobe, and both towns had many similar style of streets.
The razzmatazz and noise of the shopping area leaves me cold, but small streets like the one above encourages one to explore the unknown.
Toichi (our guide) came up trumps with his choice of restaurant. It had small individual rooms off the main area of the restaurant, which itself was not all that large.
The above shows the main area as we entered the restaurant.
I took the above from our small room and aimed the camera back to the main area.
Our room had just been vacated and the previous dinners had only just left, so the staff had not had time to remove their dirty dishes. The room was just big enough for two tables, the one that can be seen, and ours, which was like a mirror image, but without any dirty dishes.
The menu was, of course, all in Japanese, but accompanied by pictures, which helped, but as we were with Toichi the lack of English script didn’t bother us.
Maureen of course had to be careful due to being a coeliac, so she played safe and picked sushi –
Toichi and I decided on the same dish – pork in egg (similar to a large omelette)
The main dish with the red ribbon is the egg / pork, which was still cooking over flames – the red ‘ribbon’ is so that you can removed the lid without burning your fingers. The heptagon on the left contained rice, the yellow food is a type of pickle, the black pot contained soup and the white food is tofu. As you see Toichi had the same.
The grand opening of the hot pot dish.
It was all very tasty and hot, and one had to be careful – the flame under the pot kept it ‘cooking’. Of course we had to use chopsticks, which wasn’t a problem, because Maureen and I often use them with Asian dishes at home. I used the large spoon to cut the omelette in the pan, before using the chopstick. I haven’t yet worked it out how to ‘cut’ using chop sticks. The food was not all that spicy, but the overall taste was very pleasant, and the pork meat was well cooked.
Including two beers and a soft drink for Maureen, the whole meal for the three of us came to about AUD $50.00, a great experience at an inexpensive price.
Once outside we were still in the time warp of my 60’s memory – I was nineteen again.
One of the smallest, if not the smallest, temple in Osaka – unfortunately I can’t remember what Toichi said about it.
Space being at a premium inside, the staircase is on the outside of this house.
A small Shinto shrine – drop a coin in to the box and take a roll of paper (they look like cigarettes). open the roll and read your fortune. If you don’t like your what it says, tie the paper to the red/black fence on the right, and walk away leaving your bad fortune behind you.
silverfox175 