“
The guidebooks aren't wrong; Osaka is not a textbook beautiful city. Not a seamless stretch of civilization, but a patchwork of skyscrapers and smokestacks, Gucci and ghettos, that better approximates life as most of us know it.
With all this in mind, it's not surprising that Osaka is a center of casual food culture. Its two most famous foods, okonomiyaki (a thick, savory pancake stuffed with all manners of flora and fauna) and takoyaki (a golf-ball-sized fritter with a single chewy nugget of octopus deposited at its molten core), are the kind of carb, fatty, belly-padding drinking food that can sustain a city with Osaka's voracious appetite for mischief.
”
”