An old friend was coming to visit Osaka, so I offered to be the guide. The main goal of this trip was Kyoto rather than Osaka, but since we were also planning to swing by Kobe while we were at it, we booked our hotel in Osaka. I’m busy even on weekends, so I didn’t get to the hotel until around 10 p.m. that day. From there we wandered around Kyobashi near the hotel looking for somewhere to eat together, but the horse-meat specialist I’d originally planned on had already closed. The sign said they were open until 1 a.m., but a small place like that just calls it a day once the ingredients run out. So after a lot of agonizing and scrolling through Tabelog on my iPhone, we ended up at Izakaya Tsubaki. This is when the iPhone really comes in handy. The map pops up right away, too.
The entrance
For some reason it looks incredibly stylish, and places like this rarely taste all that good, right.. But it gets really good reviews for an izakaya, and it was late and I had no energy left to keep searching, so in we went. It’s apparently part of the Kobe Ninnikuya group, and the food from that group is, how should I put it.. creative cuisine with a heavy exotic vibe -_-; Well.. the menu names are very inventive, but the food is decent for the price, so it’s a popular chain. Once inside we found that every seat is in a private room, the interior is very neat, and the prices are reasonable enough. For an izakaya, that’s pretty excellent. Still, as the kickoff to a foodie trip, it made me a little uneasy.
Otoshi
The little snack that comes with your beer, and it’s fairly neat. Good enough to eat, more or less.
First, a draft beer
It was hot, so we ordered beer to double as our drinks. Well.. I drink this much every day, but my friend was impressed.. heh..
Now it’s time to look at the menu and order. A skilled izakaya usually writes its best dishes on a blackboard or something, but given this place’s concept it isn’t at that level, so I picked only very safe dishes that are hard to get wrong at any izakaya.
Nagaimo somen
Somen made from nagaimo (a kind of Japanese mountain yam), served chilled, which makes it great for summer. The crunchy texture is nice, and since it’s a dish where you only have to serve the ingredients cold, there’s not much room for failure.
Assorted yakitori, three kinds
My friend insisted on ordering this one, but the sauce was way too thick and the chicken wasn’t good quality either. On an izakaya menu, tasty meat dishes almost always carry the name of a specific region: Kagoshima pork, Hinai-jidori chicken and so on.. If they don’t, you should be a bit suspicious. In that case you can pretty much assume it won’t taste good.
Seared salmon with avocado
Salmon is one of Japan’s signature ingredients. You can get it all year round, it’s cheap and it’s fresh. Tuna exists too, of course, but it’s a bit pricey to call it everyday food. Seared (aburi) salmon tastes good even if the salmon is fairly shoddy, and with avocado on the side this is a truly foolproof dish.
Shio yakisoba
Yakisoba seasoned with salt. To be honest this version tastes better, since it doesn’t have the soggy, sticky junk-food feel of sauce yakisoba. If the ingredients are really bad, sauce yakisoba might be the better bet, but I trusted that this place hadn’t sunk that low and ordered it. Bingo, as expected~
Tai no aradaki
Tai no aradaki is a sea bream head simmered with burdock root in a soy-based sauce. The sauce itself is tasty and soaks well into the mild bream head, so it’s a dish that turns out delicious even if you make it pretty carelessly.
The izakaya was decent enough that we ate better than I’d expected. But the star of the night was the beer, not the food. Knocking back an ice-cold beer on a muggy summer night was more than enough to make my friend feel it was a good idea to come back to Japan. We called it a night there, and the real food trip started the next day.