We took an evening food tour on our first full day in Osaka. I mentioned in the introduction post for this trip report that our daughter won a sweepstakes with a large credit on a website where you can book tours. A lot of these tours are also available through Viator and TripAdvisor so we cross-referenced the tours on those sites to check reviews. We booked this tour to be able to check out the Shinsekai area of Osaka, which is sort of a retro-themed area that reminded me a bit of New York Chinatown (though obviously with Japanese food instead).

We met our guide outside the Mega-Don Quijote store near Shinsekai. The store itself was massive, but we didn’t go in this time. My daughter and I did visit a DonQui (as they call it there) in Tokyo toward the end of the trip.

We walked through the Shinsekai neighborhood and tried some local foods. First we got a goofy picture.

The first place we stopped had okonomiyaki, a pancake style savory dish made with cabbage and seafood. You essentially eat this with a spatula-type spoon right from the grill.

We also had some fried chicken.

After that, we stopped at another restaurant for takoyaki (octopus balls), sushi, tempura, and several other dishes. Unfortunately, I was enjoying the tour and speaking to the other guests on the tour (from England and Italy) and totally forgot to grab pictures of the other dishes. I did get some pictures of the area as we walked around, including the famous tower.

It wasn’t very busy in the area on a Wednesday night and I think that led to us not really loving this tour. We sort of felt like we could have walked around and found similar or better dishes at other restaurants in the area. The guide did an OK job, but we got a bit too much of his background and not enough interesting facts about the neighborhood and Osaka food in general.

After the tour, we were pretty tired so we didn’t hang around in the neighborhood and grabbed a subway ride back to the Conrad. I’ll have a lot more info and pictures about Osaka in the next post.

Up Next: Osaka Activities

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