Rice, Noodle, Fish (10 page)

Then he goes to work. First, he scores an inch-thick bamboo steak with a ferocious
santoku
blade. Then he sears it in a dry sauté pan until the flesh softens and the natural sugars form a dark crust on the surface. While the bamboo cooks, he places two sacks of
shirako
, cod milt, under the broiler. (“Milt,” by the way, is a euphemism for sperm. Cod sperm is everywhere in Japan in the winter and early spring, and despite the challenges its name might create for some, it's one of the most delicious things you can eat.)

Nakamura brings it all together on a Meiji-era ceramic plate: caramelized bamboo brushed with soy, broiled cod milt topped with miso made from foraged mountain vegetables, and, for good measure, two lightly boiled fava beans. An edible postcard of spring. I take a bite, drop my chopsticks, and look up to find Nakamura staring right at me.

“See, I told you I know what you want to eat.”

The rest of the dinner unfolds in a similar fashion: a little counter banter, a little product display, then back to the burners to transform my tastes and his ingredients into a cohesive unit. The hits keep coming: a staggering
plate of sashimi filled with charbroiled tuna, surgically scored squid, thick circles of scallop, and tiny white shrimp blanketed in sea urchin: a lesson in the power of perfect product. A sparkling crab dashi topped with yuzu flowers: a meditation on the power of restraint. Warm mochi infused with cherry blossoms and topped with a crispy plank of broiled eel: a seasonal invention so delicious it defies explanation.

Nakamura watches me eat. He watches everyone eat. Not in a creepy surveillance way, but in a sweetly innocent, I-really-hope-he-likes-this way. Soon you get the feeling that this guy has a body double or two floating around the restaurant, because despite the lavish attention he showers on all of his customers, and despite the fact that he's personally responsible for cooking at least half the plates that cross the counter, he does nothing all night but smile and look unreasonably relaxed behind the bar.

“We don't hide behind kitchen doors,” says Nakamura. “This is what makes Osaka food so special, the relationship between the chef and the guest.”

In a
kappo
setup, there are no secrets: you know the shrimp soup is laced with both the brains and the roe of the crustacean, plus a jigger of cognac; you see the nail that goes through the brain of the wriggling eel just before it's filleted; you learn that 40 degrees is the perfect angle to transform a pristine fillet of fish into a pile of perfect sashimi. (An enterprising home cook brings home a doggie bag of pro moves after dinner at Nakamura.) If you're going to spend $100 on a meal, this is how you want to spend it, on a dinner that educates and entertains as much as it satisfies.

As I'm paying the bill, an older gentleman with an electric-blue tie sparks up a conversation with the chef. “What's good right now? You have anything you're really excited about?” Nakamura reaches down into one of his coolers and pulls out a massive wedge of beef so
intensely frosted with fat that only the sparest trace of protein is visible.

“A-five Omi beef.” A hush falls over the restaurant; Omi beef, ludicrously fatty and fabulously expensive, may be Japan's finest Wagyu.

The man bites, and Nakamura gets to work on his dish. He sears the beef, simmers wedges of golden carrots, whisks a fragrant sauce made with butter and vanilla. It's the first time the beef has made an appearance all night, but by the time Nakamura flips the steak, three more orders come in. Suddenly, the entire restaurant is happily working its way through these heartbreaking steaks, and I'm left staring at my bill.

“Are you sure you want to leave?” Nakamura asks, and before I can say anything, he cuts another steak.

米 麺 魚

Of course, there are things to do in Osaka that don't involve fried meat and torched tuna and foie gras masquerading as beef. That is to say, there are nonedible activities here. You can, for example, take in Aleutian otters, Panamanian porcupine fish, and a whale shark the size of a small school bus at the Kaiyukan Aquarium, home to one of the largest collections of sea creatures in the world. You can visit one of Osaka's many awesome and offbeat museums: see rural life transposed onto urban at the Museum of Japanese Farmhouses, witness the world's largest collection of sake drinking vessels at the Museum of National Ceramics, or personalize your own Cup Noodles at the Museum of Instant Ramen. Or spend a day soaking your bones at Spa World, the Epcot Center of
onsen
, where revelers can travel through space and time to bathe in Caprian grottos, Greek medicinal baths, and the Trevi Fountain.

You can give your wallet a workout for the ages. Up near Umeda, you'll find one of Japan's greatest concentrations of department store awesomeness, including a thirteen-story Hankyu that could occupy the better part of a lifetime to fully explore. (CliffsNotes: Head straight to the basement and you will learn more about the beauty of Japanese food in an hour than in a week of restaurant eating.) Stroll the tree-lined lanes of Midosuji, Osaka's largest and leafiest boulevard, and dream dreams of Armani and Dior. (Or do what I do: dream of all the Omi beef and cod milt you can buy with the money you're not spending on clothing, purses, and other inedible extravagances.) If sprawling commercial centers and polished boulevards aren't your thing, try an afternoon at Tachibana-dori, Orange Street, retail fantasy for the hipster set, comprising a thousand meters of antique shops, boutiques, and pour-over dispensaries, all of which looks to be curated expressly for your Instagram feed.

The blue-lit backstreets of Dotonbori

(Michael Magers, lead photographer)

But ultimately, if you've come to Osaka, you've come to eat, drink, and soak up as much of the bonhomie as possible. And the best way to do that is through a good old-fashioned crawl, in search of the soul of
kuidaore
, a slow, prodding, improvised evening of binge eating, drinking, and socializing that pushes you, your companions, and the city itself to the breaking point.

On my last night in Osaka, Yuko Suzuki rejoins the rabble, determined to lead us to parts unknown across the nation's kitchen.

The crawl starts where most good crawls end: in a dank basement filled with sake. Shimada Shoten is primarily a sake distributor, with a storefront stocked with a selection of Japan's finest
nihonshu
(the owners tell me they have personally visited over 250 breweries to build out their list), but drop down a secret staircase and you land in the tasting room, with transport barrels and half-drunk bottles scattered everywhere. A group of men who look like they haven't seen daylight all week herald our arrival with a chorus of grunts.

Shimada operates on the honor system. Choose your glass from a stable of beautiful ceramic sake vessels, pick your poison from a series of refrigerators, and
at the end of the night, tally up all the damage. Let's go.

We warm up with a sparkling sake from Hiroshima, then move on to a
junmai daiginjo
from Ishikawa Prefecture, one of Japan's best sake-producing regions. You can taste its greatness, a cool shower of stone fruit and spring flowers. One refrigerator houses
koshu
, aged sake, and we take our chances with a twelve-year-old bottle from Kyoto. Aged sake makes up only a fraction of a percent of Japan's total sake production, and remains a controversial beverage, given the vast range of quality found in the end product. This particular
koshu
is as dark and musty as the room we're drinking it in.

We need a landing pad for all this rice wine, so we order the only food they serve in this joint: chunky miso from Wakayama, purple piles of pickled plums, and a strangely delicious cream cheese spiked with sake that pairs perfectly with nearly everything we pour.

Nihonshu
sneaks up on you. It goes down gently, floral and cold, coating your throat in the most positively medicinal of ways. There is no recoil, no heartburn, no palpable reminder that what you're drinking is an intoxicant—just gentle sweetness and the earthy whisper of fermentation. The beauty and size of most sake glasses—scarcely larger than a shot glass—adds to the apparent innocence of it all. But once you get started on a proper sake session, with you pouring for your partners and your partners pouring for you and nobody allowing a glass to ever approach empty, it takes on a momentum of its own.

Sake is produced in all but one of Japan's forty-seven prefectures (Kagoshima reserves its distilling ambitions for potato shochu), and the early evening unspools into a liquid road trip. Nagano, Akita, Nara, Sendai, Okayama: we race our way around Japan, testing the harvest from every corner of the country, probing the borders with our tiny glasses, savoring the nuances of climate and topography: the snowmelt
from the mountains above Niigata; the pristine waters that flow from the Katsura River outside Nara; the long, sunny days of Okinawa. A proper sake tasting will whisk you around Japan faster than the Shinkansen.

Somewhere in this liquid fantasy my notes degenerate into a series of miso stains and sake splotches and islands of isolated adjectives, which grow increasingly abstract and aggressive as the night inches forward:

Roasted asparagus . . . strawberry fields . . . liquid fireballs!

You could lose yourself quickly down the Shimada rabbit hole, which is probably why it closes at 7:00 p.m. sharp. The owner hustles us out with a broomstick, and we scatter like drunk rodents under the white glare of the streetlights.

“If we're going to make it to midnight, we'll need some real food,” says Yuko, ever a beacon of wisdom in our hazy Osaka adventures. “I have an idea.”

Osaka is home to a rich, closed-door dining scene, not just formal
ichigen-san okotowari
(invitation-only restaurants found everywhere in Japan) but clandestine spots in private homes and apartments scattered across the city. Madame X (she asked me not to use her real name, to protect her establishment) greets us at the door and ushers us into her apartment, a beautiful sunken space bathed in warm lights, with an open semipro kitchen and a bar with stools overlooking the action. Rendered chicken fat pops and crackles. A wok sizzles with blistered vegetables. Outkast bumps in the background.

We crowd into a nook around a chest-high table with a view of the residential street below. Two men in their late thirties, charming, good-looking dudes still suited up from a long Friday, join the group. They both work for United Airlines, and it is clear from the way they make their wine vanish that this was a week they'd like to forget. “Wait, what are you doing in Osaka?” one asks me, a mixture of merlot and disbelief on his breath.

Madame X returns to flood our table with a selection from tonight's menu: fried tofu floating in dashi and covered with dancing bonito flakes, spring vegetables simmered in dashi and sake, and the house specialty: pizza coverd in
shirasu
, tiny whitefish. The conversation, as it inevitably does in the presence of this foreign journalist, turns to Osaka.

Osakan fun facts ascertained during this stage of the evening:

■ Osakans are hilarious. More than 50 percent of Japan's professional comedians come from Osaka. (Kyotoites, despite living just twenty minutes away, are a decidedly unfunny species, I'm assured by everyone at the table.)

■ Everyone thinks Tokyo has Japan's best sushi, but they're wrong. Osaka does, because Osaka gets the best fish. Serious eaters from Tokyo take the train down just for dinner.

■ Osaka sake is really great, because Osaka water is really great. (At which point we switch from French wine to Osaka sake . . . Point taken.)

■ Osakans love foreigners, even if foreigners haven't fully embraced Osaka. “Please tell people to come.” I'm on it, dudes.

■ Osakans once dumped a statue of KFC magnate Colonel Harland Sanders in the Dotonbori River to celebrate a victory by the Hanshin Tigers in the 1985 Japan Championship Series. The Tigers then went on an eighteen-year losing streak, giving birth to the Curse of the Colonel theory and inciting city officials to dredge the river in search of the shipwrecked birdman. He was eventually found in 2009, though his left hand and eyeglasses remain lost to the canal; only when those are found, Osakans speculate, will the curse be fully lifted.

■ Osaka is really awesome.

From Madame X's private parlor we slip our way back into the world of legal establishments. Yuji Kawabata is a well-known restaurateur with six popular izakayas clustered around the Namba area. He's also an artist, a ceramics collector, a deep thinker, and a celebrated drinker. Soul mate material.

His restaurant is closed by the time we arrive, but he ushers us upstairs to a table, opens a massive bottle of sake, and instructs his kitchen to give us everything they've got. Out comes everything: piles of blistered
shishito
peppers, golden fried sandwiches of taro root stuffed with minced pork, bowls of dashi-braised daikon, a tower of yakitori, including my favorite,
tsukune
, a charcoal-kissed chicken meatball rich with fat and cartilage, meant to be dipped in raw egg yolk. My chopsticks cannot move fast enough.