10D9N Spring Japan Trip: Bikkuri Tako-yaki, Dotonbori Osaka
From the mouth of every person who heard about my travel plan to Osaka told me that I can miss out eating food except for two kind of foods. One is takoyaki while the other is okonomiyaki. So when we saw a big octopus on the restaurant's sign somewhere in Dotonbori, we immediately joined the queue.
The takoyaki restaurant is called Bikkuri Tako-yaki and you can see that the restaurant has two lines of queue. One is for the diners who want to dine in while the one outside where we were queueing at the moment is for the take-away takoyaki. All restaurants in Dotonbori seems to have adopted this kind of arrangement in queueing.
You must order takoyaki by boxes. One box has 8 balls of takoyaki inside. We ordered the original takoyaki (which supposedly served with original sauce). While taste-wise the takoyaki is nice (and piping hot! be careful!), the filling is very gooey. I wonder if it's because the Japanese likes gooey filling or the chef took them out from the grill too soon. LOL.
It seems that my friend did not lie to me about takoyaki being a popular dish in Osaka. All souvenir stores that we entered in Dotonbori seems to sell one thing in common, the takoyaki keychains. Hahaha.
A few steps to the left from Bikkuri Tako-yaki, I spotted the shop of famous egg tarts from Macau, Lord Stow's Bakery. While I have been to Macau twice in my life, I have not had the chance to try out these egg tarts and it's funny to be able to find them here. So, is that guy on the billboard, Mr Stow?
Lord Stow's Bakery in Dotonbori offers egg tarts in so many different flavours. But since I have never tried any of this before, I decided to stick with the original egg tart.
The egg tart is yummy and my travelling buddy said the taste is pretty similar to the one she tried in Macau (which supposedly the original one). One thing that I keep on thinking if I ever come back to Osaka in future is to stay at one of the hotels located near to Dotonbori so that it will be easy for me to buy all of the food here. LOL. #greedyme