Eating Takoyaki on Osaka’s Dotonbori Street

Takoyaki is not one of those dishes that appears on very many Japanese restaurant menus in the U.S. Typically made from a dashi-infused, flour-based batter, it is poured into tiny, golfball-sized half moon skillets, each one embedded with a small piece of cooked tako, or octopus. The dish was created in Osaka, a city obsessed with eating, and all along busy Dotonbori Street, you’ll see vendor after vendor hawking and calling out to potential customers, that they make the best version. Watching some of these cooks work is fascinating. They move with such rapid speed and efficiency. Now, if only we could get this Osaka-based snack to become more mainstream here in the U.S., we’d have some serious competition for the neighborhood falafel guy, at least with respect to spherical snacking.