Shinsekai & Tsutenkaku Route

What Shinsekai is

Shinsekai is a downtown in the south of Osaka, spread around Tsutenkaku tower. Opened in 1912 as an amusement park and pleasure quarter modelled on Paris and New York, it was named "Shinsekai" — new world. The Tsutenkaku at its centre was then a tower imitating the Eiffel Tower; the present one is a post-war rebuild, the second. From its foot runs Jan-Jan Yokocho, lined with kushikatsu shops, izakaya, shooting galleries and pinball, its Showa-era signs and red lanterns going on and on. A street opened in splendour, fallen quiet once, and grown lively again. Cheap and rich, ordinary people's food is still the star of this corner.

Kushikatsu and dote-yaki

Shinsekai's signatures are kushikatsu and dote-yaki. Kushikatsu is beef, prawn and vegetables cut bite-size, skewered, battered and fried. You dip it in the shared table sauce, but once only — "no double-dipping" is this street's rule, born of a stand-and-eat culture where many share one pot. Dote-yaki is a skewer of beef tendon stewed soft in white miso; the sweet miso and tender sinew sit just right between the fried skewers. Both are ordered cheaply one at a time, and eaten as each comes off the fryer or out of the pot, with cabbage to nibble between.

How to walk this route

Start at Dobutsuen-mae station. Up at street level is the mouth of Jan-Jan Yokocho. Walk the narrow arcade north, Tsutenkaku as your marker. Begin at Kushikatsu Daruma with beef skewers and prawn, one at a time — the shared sauce once only, cabbage to clear the palate between. A little on, at Yaekatsu, a skewer of the signature dote-yaki, the sweet miso stew settling the oil of the fried food. Finish at Sennariya Coffee, seated over the glass of mixed juice that began here. About two hours on foot; fried, then stewed, then a sweet drink — that is the Shinsekai order.