Kushikatsu in Juuso

I randomly found an amazing Kushikatsu shop in Juuso (十三) in Osaka the other night.

The name of the shop is 珍寿 (chinjyuu) , and the owner has been working kushikatsu for 55 years. He started when he was 17 years old, right out of junior high school and he never went to high school. He later met his wife, and they have been making kushikatsu ever since.

The current shop is extremely small. I counted 8 or 9 chairs around an extremely small counter. Very homely.

Smoking and eating kushikatsu for 55 years… He even lived through the war… I think this guy may be immortal!

He proudly told us that in his day, you had to live in with the kushikatsu master you were learning under. He would wake up, clean the shop, cook some kushikatsu, clean up again, and sleep at night right in the same building. He has been working in his current place in Juuso for about 8 years, and before that he has worked in various places around Osaka, including the Hankyu Department Store. He says that most all of the people making Kushikatsu at the restaurants in Hankyu were his students (弟子) at one point.

You may notice that he is wearing a beret. He showed us an old black and white picture of himself in a cooking studio wearing the beret as well. He says it’s his trademark and he wears it because he is making “art food”. The couple has been featured on TV countless times.

He was quick to point out that his kushikatsu is cooking (料理), unlike the kushikatsu in other places, like Shinsekai which is just a side dish (おかず) . He told us that in Juuso you can tell which shops are cooking shops (料理) and which just serve side dishes (おかず) by the material used for the curtain (のれん) hanging out in front of the shop. The cooking shops have hemp curtains, and the others have cotton curtains. The cooking shops, like his, are much more expensive, but have higher quality food. Sure enough, his stuff was delicious!

When you enter this shop, you don’t order anything. Only your drink. Which can be a little tricky because the grandmother who takes the orders is extremely forgetful… Or maybe she was drunk. I’m not sure. She asked the three of us for our order about 7 times… So 1 wheat shochu with water, one potato with hot water, and one sake? No no, 1 wheat shochu with hot water, and 2 potato shochu with cold water… We went around a few times. It was funny.

Once you sit down the couple starts cooking your kushikatsu one by one in a predetermined order. They place them on your dish as they are done. When you’re full, you tell them to stop, and you pay for what you ate. The order is on the menu there, they just take you from the top left all the way around. They say that if you come on an empty stomach, you can easily do a full round.

Get this, there is even desert at the end! We had desert ice cream kushikatsu with a strawberry inside. It was amazing. Imagine a strawberry on a skewer, covered in icecream, and then covered again by the breaded fry stuff that is on kushikatsu. You have to bite into it quickly, or you’ll burn your tongue on the hot oil before the ice cream has a chacen to cool the outside. Also if you wait too long the ice cream on the inside will melt!

It was delicious.

The sauce that the skewer (the kushi) is pointing to as they set down your food indicates which sauce you are supposed to use with which kushikatsu.

The lady was quick to point out that two of her sauces are blends of more than 20 different flavors. Even the salt uses 5 different types of salt!

By the way, Juuso has a reputation for being one of the more dangerous parts of Osaka, so I asked the master about it. He said that it used to be dangerous because there were a lot of yakuza hanging around in the area. These days though, it’s illegal to even talk about yakuza dealings, so things are much better.

So go give Juso kushikatsu a try!

Here is a Google Maps to the shop. The address is also located on that page…

Yahoo Gourmet info here. Hot Pepper map here.

By the way, the place is not cheap! I think it’s worth it though, the food is great, the owners are talkative, friendly, and interesting, and it’s got a really deep Osaka atmosphere!

- Harvey