At long last I’ve found the time to sort out the rest of the photos from my Osaka/Kyoto trip. This time I was traveling with my elders, so we ended up eating at department-store restaurant floors not once but twice. I don’t remember ever being taken shopping at a department store as a kid, or going to one of their restaurant floors, so even as an adult I never had much interest in them. Having been this time, I really don’t think I’ll be going much in the future either. Department stores are for looking around, right..
Anyway, we had to eat something in Kyoto, but there wasn’t any cheap place we could just drop into, and I was also worried about getting back to Osaka, so we stopped by the Isetan at Kyoto Station.
Shrimp / chicken tenderloin / bite-size hire katsu at Wako, which we had for dinner
Wako is a tonkatsu place I used to go to a lot. It’s a nationwide chain, and wherever you eat it, you’re guaranteed a certain level of quality. It’s just too greasy, so I don’t go much these days. Maybe it’s also that my palate got spoiled after eating top-class tonkatsu a few times.
Hire katsu
It seemed a bit less tasty than when I had it before.
Rosu katsu
This one seemed better..
The rosu katsu nabe I ordered.
Sweet and tasty. It’s not really greasy, but the portion is big, so I got a little tired of it toward the end.
Free refills of cabbage and miso soup
After a day of sweating it out on the road, you can’t skip a glass of beer, right?
That was a good meal~
Nihon-ichi Otako, “Japan’s best”
A takoyaki stand where you queue up to eat. The taste is definitely good and it’s cheap too, but I think queuing for it once in a lifetime is plenty.
Takoyaki cooking up nicely.
We took them out to the Dotonbori riverside and polished them off.
These days nothing much fun happens even when I travel. Life feels kind of dull and dry.
The next day I thought we might have eel for lunch near Osaka Station, and when I searched, a department-store restaurant came up. So we went.
Tempura set that comes with an unadon
It isn’t cheap, but in return the taste is decent enough.
The steamed-vegetable set I ordered
Vegetables are good for you. I enjoy eating vegetables normally too, and I have to make a point of getting them when traveling as well.
The vegetables come out roughly like this.
Unadon set
The eel still had a slightly muddy smell. Of course it can’t compare with the top-class famous places, but it’s edible enough. I think department-store food is all like this. Decent enough to eat, good service, but a bit pricey.. Totally different from my style of chasing extremes. Well, I guess chasing the extreme for a single meal is the weird thing anyway.