Kushikatsu Daruma

Skewers are ordered a few at a time as you go, not all at once. Prices run from about ¥143 for the cheap vegetables to ¥396 for beef and the better cuts, and they arrive within a minute or two of ordering because everything is fried to order in front of you.

Then the rule. The stainless tray of sauce on the counter is shared with everyone sitting at it and refilled through the service. You dip each skewer once, before the first bite, and then you stop. The bowl of raw cabbage is free, refillable, and is a tool: you use a leaf as a scoop to carry more sauce to the skewer. That is its entire purpose and it is why it is there.

Start with the beef, which is the house skewer and is what the shop is measured by. Then quail egg, lotus root, asparagus, and the cheese if you like that sort of thing. Ten to fifteen skewers and a beer comes to ¥2,000 to ¥3,000, and there is nothing else in central Osaka that eats this well for that money.

Daruma has branches in Dotonbori, Namba, Shin-Osaka, Umeda and the airport, and they are consistent and perfectly good. The Shinsekai original is a different proposition: a small corner shop with a scowling plaster Daruma face above the door, a fryer two feet from your elbow, and twelve stools.

Twelve is the number that catches people. There is no waiting list and no phone booking; you stand outside. On a Friday or Saturday evening that is thirty to sixty minutes. The usable slots are opening – 11:00, or 10:30 at weekends – and after 21:00, when the district thins out and there is still ninety minutes of frying left.

If the queue is impossible, do not default to a branch. Walk fifty metres into Jan-Jan Yokocho, the covered arcade running south, where there are a dozen kushikatsu counters of the same vintage with seats free. The one you want has a visible fryer, a handwritten wall menu and customers without luggage.

This is Shinsekai food and it belongs to the district. Kushikatsu was a labourer’s meal: cheap protein, fried fast, eaten standing, paid for by the skewer so you could stop when your money ran out. The pricing structure is still the original social contract and it is the reason the dish never became expensive.

Tsutenkaku is three minutes’ walk and is now ¥1,500 with a compulsory advance reservation, so book that before dinner rather than afterwards. For the refined counter version of the same dish, Gojoya is Michelin-listed and is in Minami, open 17:00 to 23:00 Monday to Saturday and closed Sundays and holidays.