In my last post, I mentioned the eat-till-you-drop spirit of kuidaore (which I initially misspelled as kuidadore, but that’s what happens you edit your own writing. It’s since been corrected.) This is something the late Anthony Bourdain talked about in the Osaka episode of his Travel Channel show, No Reservations. While in Japan, I’ve managed to dine at many of the places where Bourdain dined in his travels here, but today, I want to focus specifically on a stretch of restaurants in the neon-lit street food mecca of Namba, Osaka.
In this post, I’ll be alternating my own photos with images from the No Reservations episode in question, and I have to apologize, because on the U.S. Prime Video store, where I bought the episode for the express purpose of taking a few screenshots, it was only available in SD (standard definition, as opposed to high definition or HD). I owned the same episode already on iTunes, but iTunes doesn’t allow you to take screenshots, and the episode doesn’t seem to be streaming anywhere in Japan.
This is an old season 1 episode of No Reservations that’s never been remastered as far as I can tell, so the image quality isn’t the best here, but the point of it is to illustrate the connection between people and places, some of which are no longer around in the same form. That begins with Bourdain himself (R.I.P.) The title of the episode is simply “Japan,” and it was the first time Bourdain visited the country for either of his two best-known shows, No Reservations and Parts Unknown.
Curried Rice with Raw Egg at Jiyuken
Bourdain defines kuidaore as bankrupting oneself with food or eating oneself to ruin. He begins the process elsewhere in Osaka, but Jiyuken is the first place where he sits down when he gets to Namba with the manzai (two-man comedy) team showing him around the city in No Reservations. It’s also the first place where we sat down to eat when we arrived in Osaka earlier this month.
We weren’t planning to skip lunch that day. That’s just how it worked out, but it left us plenty hungry by the time we got to Jiyuken. The restaurant is small and it has a nice local vibe, well befitting the image of a spot that a “punk-rock” Japanese writer like Sakunosuke Oda (as Bourdain characterizes him) might frequent.
The signature menu item at Jiyuken is a plate of rice with curry already mixed in, and a raw egg on top. It’s a hearty dish, but not so hearty that you won’t have room for other things if you come to Osaka on an empty stomach, like we did. Bourdain likens the dish to a “spicy risotto,” but for me, the raw egg and optional Worcestershire sauce dampened the spice until the end, at which point I began to feel it kick in as sort of a delayed hot-mouth reaction.
Established in 1910, Jiyuken is located in a Namba shopping arcade near Dotonbori, and I’ve heard that it can draw long lines. But we went after the lunch rush for an early bird dinner, and there were only a few other people in there (who had cleared out by the time we left). Bourdain stops to admire the plastic food window, and we saw a guy doing that, too. There’s a cardboard cutout of the owner outside; she was there, and you can see her welcoming Bourdain in the episode.
No Double Dipping at Kushikatsu Daruma
After Jiyuken, Bourdain is shown heading into Sammy Ebisu Plaza, where he eats kushikatsu at “Daruma” on “the upper floor of an office building.” Sammy Ebisu Plaza is no longer there; it closed in 2009. But it looks like the chef who serves Bourdain is none other than Katsuya Ueyama, the president of Ichimonkai, which operates the local Kushikatsu Daruma chain. He has the same mustache and hat logo as Daruma Minister, a caricature of Ueyama, who serves as the chain’s mascot, like a Japanese Colonel Sanders (keeping in mind that there’s a legendary sports curse involving the Colonel, the local Hanshin Tigers baseball team, and nearby Dotonbori Canal.)
In voiceover, Bourdain subtly educates the viewer about the precise makeup of kushikatsu. They’re “batter-dipped and fried” skewers with different fillings, usually meat and vegetables, though we also had cheese and even gonzo ice cream skewers (which weren’t half bad) at Kushikatsu Daruma. While kushikatsu might sound, to the uninitiated, like tempura on a stick, the Michelin Guide differentiates it from tempura in the type of batter used, with kushikatsu batter mixing in stronger flour and breadcrumbs.
Ueyama speaks English in the episode, telling Bourdain, “Single dipping in the sauce, please,” and Bourdain jokes about how kushikatsu entails “the Seinfeld rule, also known as the Costanza statutes,” whereby absolutely no double dipping is to be done. It’s not tolerated on these premises, and Bourdain learns that the hard way as he momentarily forgets and receives a whack to the head, as if Daruma Minister and the manzai comedians who serve as his patrons and enforcers also come from the Soup Nazi school of Seinfeld cuisine.
In 2020 (via Kyodo News), the Dotonbori branch of Kushikatsu Daruma added a gigantic Daruma Minister figure to the top of Ichimonkai headquarters in Namba. Instead of, “No soup for you,” it includes the mandate “No double dipping!” in Japanese.
Kushikatsu and Clown Drummers in the Time of Covid
We ate in the basement of the Ichimonkai/Daruma building, with the back window running along Dotonbori Canal. Even if you’re not looking up at the figure atop the building, it’s impossible to miss the Dotonbori branch of Kushikatsu Daruma because of the giant Daruma Minister head that makes up the restaurant façade. As you near the front of the line outside the restaurant, you’ll be looking straight up Daruma Minister’s impressive pair of nostrils.
Because of the pandemic, Kushikatsu Daruma doesn’t put out a communal sauce pot for people to share anymore, so the double dipping thing isn’t as much of an issue now, anyway. Instead, what they do now is just give you a sauce bottle to squirt into a dish for your kushikatsu, as you eat it with a side of raw cabbage slices. I was fine by that because the skewers were still tasty.
Incidentally, the way the Osaka episode of No Reservations is edited is a tad confusing because, after leaving Kushikatsu Daruma, there’s a five- or six-second montage, and then Bourdain is coming face-to-face with Kuidaore Taro, the clown “mascot of the 8-story restaurant complex we just left.” It seems Bourdain suffered from a mild case of coulrophobia, or fear of clowns.
The editing makes it appear as though Kushikatsu Daruma and Kuidaore Taro were once located in the same building. They’re not now! The whole episode was filmed back in 2006, so it seems like, after Sammy Ebisu Plaza closed, Kushikatsu Daruma might have relocated across the street.
Either way, in the here and now of 2023, Kushikatsu Daruma Dotonbori is situated directly opposite the Nakaza Kuidaore Building. That’s where you’ll find Kuidaore Taro in all his candy-striped, clown-drumming glory.
All Things Crab at Kani Doraku Dotonbori
After Kushikatsu Daruma, Bourdain heads down the street for grilled crab legs at Kani Doraku, where he also tries on a crab hat and makes a pronunciation joke about how he thought he “went to high school with a ‘Connie’ Doraku.”
Kani means “crab” in Japanese, and Kani Doraku’s moving, mechanical crab sign is a well-known sight. There’s more than one of them in the Dotonbori area, but the original, main branch, or honten (where the crab no longer wears the white sash shown in the episode), is just around the corner from the ever-popular Glico Running Man sign. They even do a livestream of the water tank at this flagship location. (Dotonbori is sometimes rendered “Dotomdori.”)
Like Kushikatsu Daruma, Kani Doraku is a chain, and it’s one whose crab legs extend beyond the Kansai region to Tokyo. There’s a branch near Shinjuku Station and even one out in the suburbs of Chofu, where we live. I suppose there’s a certain amount of street cred that comes from eating at the original branch of a famous chain, but I had already eaten crab nigiri sushi at the original Kani Doraku the first time I visited Dotonbori and took a canal boat cruise there, back in 2011.
Azusa wasn’t all that interested in eating something we can get back home, and I don’t always have the patience for shelling crab legs, either. So, since I’d been there before, we skipped Kani Doraku this time in favor of other novelty snacks, like the new edible 10-yen coin at Daiou Cheese Juu-En Pan. It’s located near the cruise dock, under the oval-shaped Don Quijote Dotonbori Ferris wheel.
In addition to the penguin mascot Donpen, this Don Quijote is adorned by Ebisu, the same god of commerce who once marked the entrance to Sammy’s Ebisu Plaza. Hence, the oval wheel’s nickname, Ebisu Tower. To be fair, they have these cheesy 10-yen snacks at the Don Quijote in Shibuya, too, but we didn’t know that at the time. The Ferris wheel itself wasn’t operating that night in Osaka.
Detour: Catching Up with the Glico Running Man
By the bye, I don’t know if it’s just that inflation has set in and/or that they’ve raised their prices significantly, but it’s not nearly as inexpensive at Kani Doraku as Bourdain suggests. Maybe they gave him the celebrity discount and that’s how he was able to get “two grilled crab legs for about five dollars.”
There’s one more stop after this on the Bourdain food tour of Namba, but here’s where our path starts to diverge from his a little. You see, we took a detour on Dotonbori Canal to see the requisite Glico Running Man.
One new wrinkle with the Running Man is that he has a cleaner neon background now. When I first saw him in 2011, there were four Osaka landmarks on the track behind him (see above), but those are long gone now.
Before I settled on the Bourdain angle, I was tempted to make this post a list like “5 Things to Do and See in Namba, Osaka (Besides the Glico Running Man),” just because I feel like Glico’s huge sign over the canal is already such a well-known city landmark. But why discriminate?
Glico is a food company, so there’s still a food connection with it here. Among other things, the company processes the ubiquitous Pocky brand of chocolate-covered pretzel sticks. That does make the athletic Running Man himself a rather curious choice for a company sign, but maybe it’s precisely because he’s eaten Glico’s food products that he has such energy to run.
Either way, the Glico Running Man is a popular photo spot and a natural starting point at night if it’s your first time in Dotonbori. While we do see surrounding sights like the gate to Dotonbori, we never really get a good look at him in Bourdain’s No Reservations episode, though, presumably because Bourdain wanted to avoid anything too touristy or because they had barriers up along Dotonbori Bridge at the time to prevent overzealous Hanshin Tigers fans from going the way of Colonel Sanders and jumping in the canal.
You can, however, see the Glico Running Man at one point in the background of the Ridley Scott film Black Rain, starring Michael Douglas, Andy Garcia, and the late Ken Takakura.
Adding Okonomiyaki at Fukutaro to the List
The final stop on Bourdain’s food tour of Namba, Osaka, is an unspecified restaurant where he watches the chef grill up okonomiyaki: savory Japanese pancakes filled with ingredients like beef, pork, seafood, and cabbage. He eats some there before throwing in the towel (or bib, as it were) and descending into “the karaoke heart of darkness.”
When we were in Osaka, I was going off my own GaijinPot article about Bourdain’s travels in Japan, which I wrote shortly after his passing in June 2018. It looks like the editorial powers that be might have updated that article and reposted it since then, because, although it still shows a publication date of June 29, 2018, the wording at the beginning has been changed to “Bourdain’s untimely death in June last year.”
Whatever the case, I sort of glossed over the okonomiyaki restaurant in that article because Bourdain never says the name of it and I wasn’t sure where it was. Then we got back from Osaka this month and I started doing a little more research online. I found this okonomiyaki and negiyaki restaurant called Fukutaro in Namba that says it was featured on No Reservations. It’s also been featured on numerous Japanese TV shows.
There are pictures on the website of a guy (identified only as the manager of the main store) who looks an awful lot like the chef who serves Bourdain okonomiyaki on No Reservations. Fukutaro has another branch in Umeda and one in the Takashimaya department store in Osaka, but it’s a smaller chain compared to Kushikatsu Daruma and Kani Doraku. I haven’t eaten there yet since the name of the restaurant was a mystery that I just now solved while writing this. However, I’m definitely adding it to my list of places to visit the next time we’re in Osaka (which could be as soon as late March when we’re back in Kansai and Kyoto for cherry blossom season).
Parts Well-Known
After No Reservations, Bourdain went on to host the even longer-running CNN series Parts Unknown. A 2017 CNN Travel article (“In defense of being a tourist”) observed:
“Tourist” is now a coded derogatory term to refer to a person who goes to chain restaurants in other cities or who spends hours waiting in line for an overpriced activity.
Going by that definition, Anthony Bourdain was as much a tourist as anyone else when he came to Osaka. There’s a more nuanced view, of course, with the CNN article going on to point out that what people really mean when they say they’re not a tourist is that they’re “being respectful of cultural customs,” while open to trying new foods. Bourdain usually ticked those boxes, so I think his legacy is secure.
Here in Tokyo, I’m not sure about other Kani Doraku locations in the city, but the one near Shinjuku Station wasn’t very busy when Azusa and I ate there one Sunday afternoon. The décor was nice, but we were both somewhat disappointed with the food. Maybe that’s why the place was so dead? All I know is, after watching No Reservations, I had that larger-than-life image of crab legs on the grill burned into my brain, but when we ordered some and the plate came, it was smaller, less appetizing, and much more expensive (definitely more than five dollars). It reminded me why digging for crab meat is sometimes more trouble than it’s worth.
At the Shinjuku Station branch, we did a walk-in, but the flip side of that is the suburban Chofu branch of Kani Doraku. It’s next to a Porsche dealership near Sengawa Station, and contrary to the title of Bourdain’s show, you might not be able to get a table there without a reservation, even on a weekday. That’s what happened to me, at least, when I stopped by there today. The only takeout option was sushi, so I ended up taking home a wrapped box of the same crab nigiri that I ate all those years ago at Osaka’s original Kani Doraku, first founded in 1971.
A kimono-wearing hostess provided me with a hot towel and a cup of hot green tea while I waited and watched the Sebastians prepare to meet their demise in their tank. Afterward, I came home and ate my crab nigiri — which was pretty darn good, as sushi goes — while watching an episode of the Netflix anime horror anthology Junji Ito Maniac: Japanese Tales of the Macabre.
The funny thing is, I landed on the episode with the story “The Thing That Drifted Ashore,” where a black crab appears onscreen right as it’s talking about “fish, huge and uncanny, that have survived since ancient times.” Rather like the Kani Doraku crab, still waving its giant, mechanical red claws at passers-by after 50-plus years.