Shinsekai

Kushikatsu is deep-fried skewers – beef, quail eggs, lotus root, asparagus, cheese, whatever the counter has – and each shop keeps a communal stainless tray of thin Worcestershire-style sauce on the counter, refilled through the evening and used by everyone sitting at it.

Therefore: dip once, before the first bite. After that the skewer has been in your mouth and the tray is not yours. Every shop provides a bowl of free raw cabbage, and the cabbage is not a garnish or a salad. It is a scoop: you use a leaf to carry more sauce onto the skewer. That is what it is for, and it is refillable.

Breaking this is the one thing that will genuinely annoy people around you, and the signs saying nido-zuke kinshi – no double dipping – are on the wall of every single shop in the district for a reason.

Kushikatsu Daruma began here in 1929 and the Shinsekai original branch is still the one to use. Skewers run from about ¥143 to ¥396, it opens 11:00 to 22:30 and from 10:30 at weekends, and it has twelve counter seats and takes no reservations. You queue. Twelve seats is the number that surprises people who have seen the chain’s branches elsewhere.

There are perhaps forty other kushikatsu shops within three hundred metres and most of them are fine. The tell of a good one is a visible fryer, a short menu on the wall rather than a laminated book, and customers who are not carrying luggage. A full meal of ten to fifteen skewers with a beer comes to ¥2,000 to ¥3,000, which makes this the cheapest good dinner in central Osaka.

If you want the refined counter version instead of the standing version, Gojoya is Michelin-listed, opens 17:00 to 23:00 Monday to Saturday, and is closed Sundays and holidays – but it is in Minami, not here.

Shinsekai is routinely described in English-language writing as dangerous. It is not. What it is, is poor: it sits next to Airin, the day-labourers’ quarter around Shin-Imamiya, which has Japan’s largest concentration of cheap lodging houses and of homeless men. That produces a streetscape unlike the rest of central Japan and very little in the way of actual risk. Ordinary care after midnight is enough.

Walk the arcades rather than the main street: the covered Jan-Jan Yokocho to the south is a narrow lane of kushikatsu counters, standing bars and shogi parlours, and it is the most photogenic two hundred metres in Osaka. Tsutenkaku itself is now ¥1,500 and requires an advance reservation, so book it before you come down for dinner rather than deciding at the base.

Shitenno-ji is fifteen minutes’ walk east and free, and Tennoji Park with the zoo and the Abeno Harukas tower is immediately south-east. The Namba to Shinsekai walk links all of it.