In college I experienced the worst blowup I will ever have with my parents. I had fucked up my education and I’d been hiding it from them, and they had never been so disappointed in me. It had felt like the end of the world at the time.
Days later my mom took me to what was then a new restaurant called Dohtonbori. The interiors were fun and there was a tabletop grill at every booth where you could cook your okonomiyaki yourself. It was here that we tentatively patched things up, that she did the kindest, most loving, most quintessentially mom thing she could do and welcomed me back into her arms with a smile. I’m pretty sure I was bawling in public from the gratitude.
I don’t think I could ever imagine what it was like for them to let that anger go and treat me with grace and comfort, even after what I’d done. But all they ever really wanted to do was love me.
I thought back to this day a lot as I ate my way through the real Dotonbori ten years later. How I would’ve told them about the food, maybe even how we would’ve experienced it together the way we did at that restaurant. And even though they weren’t really there, I carried them everywhere.
The place I immediately went for the day I arrived was Sushiro. I had the limited-time basil mozzarella salmon, uni rolls, and the adorable and slightly silly hamburg steak sushi. The mozzarella tempura was addictive and they had a promo with Puppet SunSun, so I chose a drink order that came with a little puppet charm.
I chose to include the daily breakfast at my hotel since I really liked the food when I first stayed here, and it was worth the splurge and waking up early. The daily menus had so much more variety than I thought possible. Fried skewers, takoyaki, and okonomiyaki, bacon and scrambled eggs, baked beef belly with loads of onions (I have no idea how they made it so flavorful), grilled chicken with lemon sauce, mini hamburg patties in demiglace, penne in different tomato sauces, shepherd’s pie, karaage, grilled salmon, mackerel, tiny pizza with different toppings, tiramisu and kiwi cake for dessert.
Karaksa Hotel is really the only choice for me in Osaka. The shower is decently sized and separate from the toilet, which I’ve really had to dig for when browsing places to stay in Japan. The location is perfect (if not all that close the nearest subway entrance). The doors are magnetic and the Do Not Disturb signs are magnets. Best of all: they offer free refreshments all day from the fancy touchscreen dispenser and there’s a microwave you can use any time for leftover food or konbini finds. Even better: they have boxes that you can use to pack shopping hauls and food instead of buying/bringing an extra suitcase, and they even let you borrow tape to seal it. (There’s also a service for shipping the boxes to your address, but I chose to check in mine.)
In Umeda I stopped at a food court and ordered mentaiko pasta at a place called Pesca. The noodles were super al dente and thinner than regular spaghetti, and the sauce was creamy and lemony and just slightly briny with loads of soft, chunky salmon.
For dinner that night I had another pasta, this time a plate of carbonara from Saizeriya. I liked the unlimited drink bar, and the pasta itself was salty and eggy.
I was finally reunited with the true love of my life, ramune-flavored Skal, and it was just as good as I remember. My other konbini favorites: cheesy chicken nuggets from Lawson and their blue mint chip ice cream, the coffee jelly that’s Hoseok’s favorite and that Aya had reminded me to get, ready-to-drink iced honey latte, and the chocolate chip scone from Family Mart.
I also managed to grab Snoopy-shaped treats that were supposed to be for White Day, and I’m still thinking about that thin chocolate-covered Wittamer cookie the kind stranger had given me at Art House.
Another place I’d been wanting to check out was Bikkuri Donkey. I got the hamburg steak with cheese sauce, and it was fun eating it with chopsticks (the texture of the rice and meat were perfect) while basking in the cozy, slightly dark interiors of the basement.
I wanted to have authentic yakisoba for lunch, but the place was still closed, so I crossed the street to Lawson and chanced upon this omusoba instead. The sauce was sweet and salty and I loved the richness added by the egg and creamy mayo. I will probably look back on this for years.
For my last lunch, I went back to Sushiro. The cheese and mayo seared salmon was great, but the best I had there was definitely the cheesy seared eel. The cut was the perfect thinness and the burst of flavor from the hidden dollop of unagi sauce is core memory material.
I got to order real street yakisoba for dinner. The noodles were flat and springy and it was topped with thin strips of wagyu beef. I held the plastic bag of takeout in my hand as I took my final walk around Dotonbori—the weight of it a promise that I still had something new to look forward to even after saying goodbye to it all.
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