Osaka Food Tours

Compare dishes, not hours — it is the most useful filter on this market. The most-booked tour runs fifteen dishes and three drinks for $61, which is about four dollars a dish; one competitor covers seventeen foods at four eateries for $53, closer to three. A market walk at $48 for six stops is more expensive per taste but includes produce you cannot eat on a street crawl. The premium backstreet tours cost more because the guiding and the neighbourhoods are the product rather than the volume.

Takoyaki, okonomiyaki and kushikatsu, and each belongs to a different district. Takoyaki is octopus in batter, eaten molten and standing up, and its home is Dotonbori. Okonomiyaki is a savoury cabbage pancake cooked on a griddle, and it is a sit-down meal. Kushikatsu is crumbed deep-fried skewers, and its home is Shinsekai — where the communal sauce pot carries one absolute rule: no double dipping.

Roughly, eat until you drop. It is the word Osakans use about their own appetite, and it is more than a joke — people here spend more of their income on food than in other Japanese cities. The city's older name for itself is tenka no daidokoro, the nation's kitchen, from the days when the country's rice and goods moved through it.

Yes, in the morning. It is a covered arcade of around 170 stalls trading since the early 19th century, and it is a working market rather than a tidy one — louder and less sanitised than Kyoto's Nishiki. Go before midday, when the stock and the energy are both best. Prices are firmly tourist-facing now, which is a fair trade for eating sashimi where it is cut, but worth knowing in advance.

Both, on different nights — they are not variations on a theme. Dotonbori is neon, canal, crowds and takoyaki eaten walking. Shinsekai is shabby, retro, built for a 1912 exposition and left alone since, and it is about sitting at a kushikatsu counter. If you only have one evening, take Dotonbori for the spectacle, and eat one street back from the canal rather than on it.

From about $30 to $105 across the tours we track, with most between $48 and $70. The number worth comparing is DISHES, not hours — fifteen tastings in three hours is a very different evening from four in the same time, and the price gap between them is usually smaller than the gap in what you eat.

The tours here run with English-speaking guides, and that is much of the point. A lot of the best counters operate on cash, Japanese and a laminated sheet — no obstacle if you have a week to get comfortable, a real one on a single evening.

At a kushikatsu counter the sauce pot is shared by everyone, so a skewer goes in once, on the way to your mouth, and never again. Every shop has a sign about it and most visitors break it once. If you want more sauce, use the cabbage they give you as a spoon.