What to Do in Dotonbori

Eat, Mostly

Dotonbori is a few hundred metres of restaurants and the point of it is food. The canonical order, roughly:

• Takoyaki — octopus balls, from a street window, eaten standing up and too hot. This is the Osaka dish.
• Kushikatsu — skewered and deep-fried everything, with a communal sauce pot and one iron rule: no double dipping. It is Shinsekai’s speciality, a short walk south.
• Okonomiyaki — the savoury pancake, cooked on a hotplate at your table.
• Ramen, at any hour, including hours that surprise visitors.

The Sights, Such as They Are

• The Glico Running Man — see the Glico guide
• The Kani Doraku crab — mechanical, since 1960, underrated
• Ebisubashi bridge — the crossing everyone photographs from
• Hozenji Yokocho — a stone-paved alley one street back, with a moss-covered statue people splash water onto. It is the quiet counterweight to the neon and most visitors walk past the entrance without seeing it.

Worth Paying For

• $70 — the Shinsekai street-food tour, 1,814 reviews at 4.9. Fifteen tastings and three drinks, and it solves the ordering problem at counters with no English menu.
• $69 — a ramen and gyoza cooking class in Dotonbori itself, 530 reviews at 5.0.
• $44 — sushi making, on the same street.
• $30 — a Namba bar crawl with a local guide, 560 reviews.
• $48 — Kuromon market in the morning, which is the other half of Osaka’s food story and much calmer.
• $34 — a night history walk, if you want the city explained rather than eaten.

The Order That Works

Cruise just after sunset. Eat afterwards. Twenty minutes on the water while the light is right, then the street when it is fully dark and the stalls are busy. Doing it the other way round means either rushing dinner or missing the 21:00 last boat.

Beyond the Canal

For Osaka’s wider food scene, osaka-food-tour.com is an independent guide covering the city’s food tours in detail, and osakacookingclass.com does the same for hands-on classes.

See cruise and walking tours →