Kitsune udon

Kansai and Kanto part company over dashi, and udon is where you can taste it. A Tokyo udon broth is dark: katsuobushi-led, with dark soy, and it looks like weak coffee. An Osaka broth is pale gold and nearly clear – kombu-forward, with light usukuchi soy that is saltier but far less coloured, and often a mixture of dried fish rather than bonito alone.

The result is a broth you are expected to drink rather than leave. It is subtler, more saline, and considerably harder to make well, because there is nothing to hide behind: no caramel colour, no heavy soy. Order kitsune udon in Osaka and in Tokyo in the same week and the two bowls barely look related.

The noodles are part of it. Osaka udon is softer than the famously chewy Sanuki udon of Kagawa – deliberately, not sloppily. The bowl is supposed to be gentle, and people who arrive expecting Sanuki’s springiness read the softness as a fault when it is the local style.

Kitsune means fox. Aburaage is the offering left at Inari shrines, where the fox is the messenger of the rice deity, and the association is old and completely straightforward: the fox’s food on top of the noodles.

Which produces the naming trap. In Osaka, kitsune means udon with fried tofu, and tanuki – raccoon dog – means soba with the same fried tofu. In Tokyo, tanuki means noodles with tenkasu, the crunchy tempura scraps, and has nothing to do with tofu at all. Ordering tanuki in the wrong city gets you a different bowl entirely, and both shops think they are being obvious.

The other Osaka variant on the same menu is kasu udon, made with abura-kasu, crisp rendered beef intestine from southern Osaka. It is much richer, it is genuinely local in a way kitsune no longer is, and it is worth ordering once.

Everywhere. Kitsune udon is in every standing noodle bar, every station counter, every shopping-arcade shop in the city, and at ¥500 to ¥900 it is the cheapest sit-down meal in Osaka. A station counter in Umeda at eight in the morning is a perfectly good introduction.

The long arcade at Tenjinbashisuji has a run of old udon shops and is worth walking for that alone; it is also where Harukoma is, which is closed on Tuesdays.

On the 1893 claim: if you want to try the shop credited with the invention, look it up yourself and check its hours the same day. We are not printing an address and a set of opening times we could not confirm, because a shop that has been trading since the nineteenth century is exactly the kind of business whose hours change without anybody updating the internet.