8D Avia Japan Trip: Kushikatsu Lunch from Namba, Osaka
The trickiest part about joining a tour group is the food. While it’s reassuring to know that meal is provided 3x a day, you will not be able to be so choosy about the variety of the food that the tour is providing you. But then again, it’s part and parcel of a tour group so let’s hope that Avia does not feed us Chinese food in Japan. LOL.
Our first meal in Japan came after our visit to Osaka Castle. Avia brought us to a restaurant alley in busy district of Namba. I actually kinda wonder if the tour will manage to find a restaurant big enough to cater for 27 people (25 tour participants + 2 tour leaders). Turns out big restaurants exist in Japan. I feel so noob. Hahaha.
You can’t really blame me for having such worry though. Because from outside, the restaurant that we visited does not look big at all. Turns out, it has three storeys and hence, able to cater so many people including tour groups. It is frequented by many office worker because of its affordable lunch menu. A lot of Japanese office worker spotted inside the restaurant with the chicken karage set (550 JPY) in front of them. Good economical choice which cannot go wrong (cause fried stuff won’t go wrong).
I was kinda expecting similar stuff served to the tour group. But oh boy, I was so shocked with the amount of food that they gave us for each person. The table has been prepared for all of us and in front of each person there lies a place of Japanese fried noodle (a.k.a. Yakisoba), a plate of three fried chicken (a.k.a. Karage), a bowl of rice and a bowl of miso soup. The chicken karage is served with a mushroom spring roll and do you know how the Japanese love to season their fried stuff with? Yupz, a dollop of mayonaisse (which happen to be my fave too although I like to add chili sauce with it thanks to my Indonesian spicy eating culture). Yakisoba is also one of my fave food in Japan mainly because it’s...fried. I’m fried food queen indeed hahaha. Fried noodle in Japan is leaning toward the sweet side though so you probably want to add some chili powder to it if you prefer savory kind of fried noodle.
While I thought these are all that we gonna get for lunch, the lovely lady owner of the restaurant came with pans of Japanese pancakes called okonomiyaki. We thought the okonomiyaki is for sharing for each family but then she informed our tour leader that the okonomiyaki meant to be one for each person. OMG. As you can see, Japanese pancake is by no means a light dish. It’s an egg pancake filled with ingredients (mostly veggies and sometimes meat) and then it’s heavily seasoned with brown sauce (which kinda similar to takoyaki’s sauce), a heavy dose of mayonaisse, furikake and onion leaves, with a portion of ginger aside. It’s yummy but I was already half full from the yakisoba and karage earlier.
That’s not the end of the meal though because the servers came again this time with what-I-feel-was the best dish of the day, Kushikatsu (Japanese dish of deep-fried skewered meat and vegetables). You can pick from chicken to squid to onion and all of them are fried beautifully. The sauce for kushikatsu is provided on every table in a tin box which are meant for sharing. So please take note that hygiene is very important here. You are only supposed to dip your skewer to the sauce once and that’s it. You can’t possibly dip it once, lick it and dip it again to the sauce container which are meant to be for sharing purpose. Cause that’d be simply eww. LOL.
The lady owner asked us which one is our favourite dish while distributing green tea (matcha) ice cream to us. She was somewhat surprised when I pointed to her that I love the kushikatsu so much. I wonder if she expect me to answer okonomiyaki instead? Oh well, kushikatsu is the winner of my heart that day. Hehehe.
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