Takoyaki Doraku Wanaka

Takoyaki batter is much wetter than a pancake batter – thin, dashi-heavy, closer to cream than to dough. It is poured into a cast-iron plate of hemispherical wells, a cube of octopus goes in, and the balls are turned with picks as the outside sets so the uncooked batter rolls to the inside of a widening shell.

Done right the result is a thin crisp sphere with a molten savoury custard inside it that has never fully set and is not supposed to. The first one will burn your mouth. That is not a failure of the cook; it is the dish working, and anyone who tells you to wait five minutes is telling you to eat it wrong. Bite a small hole, let the steam out, then eat it.

The reason the canal stalls disappoint is structural rather than malicious. A stall serving a forty-person queue cannot fry to order, so it cooks in advance and holds the trays, and held takoyaki continues to cook and eventually sets. What you get is a solid dumpling with sauce on it. Wanaka’s plates are turned in front of you and go straight into the tray.

The standard is eight pieces for ¥500, sauce and mayonnaise and aonori and bonito. There are variants – with ponzu, with a light dashi to dip into, with spring onion – and the plain sauced version is the right first order because it is the one everything else is measured against.

Eat it standing, at the counter, out of the paper tray, with the picks provided. It does not travel: the crust softens within about four minutes and the whole difference between a good and a mediocre takoyaki disappears with it. Carrying a tray of these back to your hotel converts a ¥500 pleasure into a ¥500 disappointment.

The stand also does a takosen, takoyaki pressed between two prawn crackers, which is a genuinely good idea and very hard to eat with dignity.

Sennichimae, at the Namba end of the arcades, two or three minutes’ walk from the canal and a different economy entirely. There are other branches around the city, including at Shin-Osaka, which are useful if you are catching a shinkansen; the Sennichimae stand is the one to use if you are already in Minami.

The dish itself was invented in Osaka in 1935 by Endo Tomekichi at a stall called Aizuya, who put octopus and dashi into an existing Kansai batter snack and produced something that has since become the city’s emblem. It is ninety years old, it is street food, and it has never stopped being sold in ¥500 portions at counters like this one, which is more or less the whole argument for Osaka as a place to eat.