Here is Daikoku Dotonbori, a Japanese home-style restaurant in Osaka, where we had dinner on our first night in May 2018.
After checking into our hotel around 3:30 and heading back out at 6, we were exhausted from barely sleeping the night before. Still, it felt wrong to spend the evening on convenience-store food in Japan, so we headed to Dotonbori.
We skipped a selfie with the famous Glico sign and moved on.
Crowds were busy taking photos everywhere in Dotonbori. We barely registered that this was Dotonbori and started looking for a restaurant to rest and refuel.
We had no restaurant in mind, so finding one was hard. Ramen was out, meat was out in this land of grilled-meat smells, sushi was out. What we craved on that first night was plain rice and soup.
We searched “home-style meals” on Google Maps and found Daikoku Dotonbori. The name translates to something like “big country,” which may be a mistranslation; the characters actually mean “great black.”
It is a small, very Japanese place with shared tables. They brought a Korean menu when we asked, and Korean visitors seemed to come by sometimes, though most diners that evening were locals.
The Korean translations on the menu looked unappetizing, but we were too tired to care and ordered a bunch. You order rice, soup, and side dishes one by one, so the bill climbs fast. It felt like a restaurant from the TV show Solitary Gourmet.
We had kayaku rice, mackerel with seaweed vinegar, braised burdock and taro, and two miso soups, one with tofu and one with egg.
They served oolong tea as water; I asked for plain cold water and did not get it. The food was lightly seasoned and tidy, though the miso soup was on the sweet side.
Other tables were ordering braised eggplant and pumpkin a lot. The staff said Korean visitors often order the eggplant.
We finished everything in no time because it was that good. With no garlic or chili powder like Korean food, it left our mouths clean and our stomachs comfortable.
The rice especially stayed in my memory. The bill came to about 2,700 yen, pricey for a home-style place, but we were fully satisfied. Daikoku Dotonbori remains one of our most memorable first-night dinners in Japan. We went straight back to the hotel and slept until the next morning, too tired for that second Dotonbori outing we had planned.
Prices, hours and details in this post are from our visit in May 2018 and may have changed, so check the latest information before you go.