Tokyo has pride of place in Japan, but the most important cities after the capital are Osaka and Kyoto.
For people from Turkey, it’s never been easier to get to Osaka, as Turkish Airlines now flies there directly. We hit up Osaka, staying in the Imperial Hotel to get a feel for both it and Kyoto. The hotel includes a sushi restaurant, a classic Japanese restaurant, as well as a Chinese restaurant – all of which are good options if you want to grab a bite on the go. We landed in Osaka no sooner than we headed to a typical Japanese restaurant called Taian.
TAIAN
The sushi was good, as were the other Japanese meals on the menu. Taian only has seating for 20 at the sushi bar and 10 at the tables. Four or five sushi chefs are hard at work behind the sushi bar who, if you’re lucky, will occasionally give you a few small treats if you’re sitting right by them. Now, the tradition at a Japanese restaurant is as follows: When you call for a reservation, they immediately tell you about the price of their menus, and you choose your preference right at that moment. At the same time, you also indicate the ingredients that you won’t eat. Thanks to this, your menu is ready when you arrive at the restaurant! What’s more, everything is prepared right in front of you. And when you ask for the wine menu, they’ll just ask you to choose between white and red; now, you might think that they have separate menus for white and red, but you’ll soon realize that there are just two types of wine – no lists, no menus, just two types of wine. This is mostly the case everywhere – even in three-star restaurants. Thankfully, however, Taian had a decent wine list, which meant we had a wonderful meal with wine.
DOJIMA&HUMAN
While at Taian, we started to chat with a retired Japanese surgeon at the next table. The restaurant we had lined up for the day after was really far away and, to be honest, I wasn’t eager to go there. I duly asked for some restaurant advice from this gentleman, who now spends his days enjoying his retirement with his wife. I wanted a nice, normal place that the locals enjoyed – something without a Michelin star. He gave us a card with the address, in Japanese, of one of his top restaurants. Thanks to the efforts of a cab driver, we were able to reach the restaurant, a sushi place with room for a maximum of 15 people. They didn’t ask about our menu choices beforehand, as most places do, but they did ask us for our preferences. We plumped into different choices of sushi, which they prepared wonderfully. It was only later that I learned the place’s name: Dojima and Human.