Kushikatsu Gojoya

Street kushikatsu is volume cooking: a basket of skewers into the oil, out, onto the counter, and the shared sauce tray does the seasoning because everybody is eating the same thing. It is cheap, it is fast, and the communal tray is the reason the no-double-dipping rule exists at all.

A counter like this fries one skewer at a time and seasons each one to its own ingredient – salt on some, a dab of something on others, occasionally nothing. The crumb is finer and the oil temperature is moved between items, which is only possible at a few skewers a minute. Which means: there is no shared tray to dip into, and the rule that governs the whole rest of the genre does not apply here.

It also means the meal has a shape. Skewers arrive in an order, lighter to richer, seafood through vegetables to meat, in the way a kaiseki progresses. You are eating a menu rather than ordering by the piece until you stop.

Coming here without having eaten in Shinsekai is a mistake that costs you most of the point. Everything Gojoya is doing is a comment on the standard version: the finer crumb only reads as finer if you know what the standard crumb is like, and the individually seasoned skewers only land if you have had an evening of dipping everything in the same tray.

So: Daruma or a Jan-Jan Yokocho counter one night, at ¥2,000 to ¥3,000 with a beer, and Gojoya another. Osaka is one of very few cities where you can eat the folk version and the refined version of the same dish within three kilometres and forty-eight hours, and doing so teaches you more than either meal alone.

The order matters more than the gap. Cheap first, refined second. The reverse leaves you disappointed by Shinsekai for reasons that are not Shinsekai’s fault.

Book. It is a small room carrying a MICHELIN Guide listing in a city where that listing is read carefully, and walking in at 19:00 on a Friday is optimistic. Reserve through the Michelin listing or by phone with hotel help if your Japanese is not up to it.

The Sunday and public holiday closure is the thing that actually catches people. A typical two-night Osaka stop lands on a weekend, which leaves Saturday as the only possible evening, which is also the hardest one to book. If your trip is Friday to Sunday, reserve for Friday.

It is in Minami, so the rest of the evening writes itself: Dotonbori is lit until late and free, and the bars are in the lanes behind it.