Osaka, the official kitchen of Japan, is home to the Kani Doraku crab restaurant. It’s located in the famous street called Dotonbori and is easily identifiable by its big ass mechanical crab at its entrance.
Getting straight to the point, if you ever visit there, get their crab banquet. For 4600 yen (approx AU$46) per person, you get:
* half a dozen crab legs
* half a dozen crab claws
* 3 crab tempura
* half a dozen crab sushi
* crab soup
* crap load of vegies and tofu
* crab fried rice
* green tea ice cream
But that’s not the reason why this place is gracing the cover of gourmandonline. Look closely at the above pic.
Each crab leg and claw has half its shell perfectly cut off, leaving you only needing to lift the succulent juicy crab meat up, dip into the 5 different sauces and insert into mouth. Ever since I first tasted crab, I’ve always wanted to be able to shove in a mouthful of crab without having to deal with the technicalities of extracting the meat. For a lazy bum like me, this place is heaven.
For the first time in my life, I got FILLED UP on CRAB. Who said Japan was expensive?
If you’re ever in Dotonbori, look for this restaurant.
On the same street we found this Fugu restaurant. Fugu is those Japanese fish which can become poisonous (leading to instantaneous death) if not cut properly. If prepared properly, it is a heavenly feast. When we saw the place, it wasn’t a matter of us being scared of dying, it was more like we couldn’t afford to die this way. AU$200 per plate.
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It was our first night in LA, wandering the sidewalks of the seedy Hollywood Boulevard. After dodging beggers, buskers, aliens, and getting half scared to death by some guy dressed in a Scream costume, we stumbled into ‘The Grill’ in the kodak Theatre complex…
The place looked pricey, with a super-dark candle-lit atmosphere, leather couches and immaculate waiters. But the menu prices actually weren’t too bad, equivalent to some of the semi-posh restaurants in Melbourne. I ordered the Skirt steak with potatoes and vegies as sides, and my mum ordered the herbed slow-roasted chicken with rice and vegies as sides.
This first restaurant we stumbled into turned out to be the best restaurant we’ve eaten at in LA. Firstly, the size of the meals verified everything we’ve heard about the large American sizes — this may be a posh restaurant, but they are NOT into the big plate with bite-sized food piled into the middle thing. My steak, while being a thin strip (as is the style of a skirt steak), still filled the entire hot plate. And when my mum’s chicken came out, it looked like they found a chicken on steroids, roasted it and literally put a whole half of it on the plate. The steak was wonderfully juicy and and perfectly marinated with a tangy sauce. It was medium to well-done as requested (unlike many other restaurants that left the meat still bleeding — its much harder for a restaurant to cook a good well-done steak than a good rare steak) and incredibly tender. The chicken tasted like it was truly slow-roasted the old fashioned way, with a just-cooked tenderness and not too much sauce. These simply cooked meats did not have to rely on artistic presentation or exotic flavourings to be outstanding – just their texture and succulence alone made them immediately impressive. The sides, while not as exceptional as their main attractions, were still impressive in their quantity… heck even the complementary bread they gave us in the start was a whole basket-full.
We were, quite literally, stuffed. It was just a shame that we had to waste some of that wonderful food ‘cos we were way, WAY too stuffed to finish it.
