The Best Takoyaki in This City Is Not Ours

We serve takoyaki. I am happy with it. It is also not the best takoyaki in this city, and I am not going to pretend otherwise, because the reason it is not is interesting.

What It Actually Takes

Start with the octopus. Before it can go anywhere near a batter it has to be rubbed down with salt, and not for a minute or two. Hours. That is what breaks the texture down and pulls the slime off it. Then it gets boiled, then it gets cut.

The batter is made fresh. Then somebody stands at the pan and cooks each ball individually, turning it with a metal pick as it sets. This is the part people misunderstand. A takoyaki pan is not a waffle iron. Nothing is casting a shape for you. Every ball becomes a ball because a person rotated it in its own well at the right moment, over and over, across a whole pan.

And it goes fast. It is not a thing you set a timer for and walk away from. The window between raw and ruined is small, and you are aiming for a very specific result: browned and holding together on the outside, still loose and molten in the middle. Takoyaki that is cooked through is takoyaki that failed.

So one person, doing nothing else, the entire time.

That is why in Japan you get takoyaki from a stall at a festival or from a small shop that sells takoyaki and essentially nothing else. It is not that restaurants cannot do it. It is that the dish demands undivided attention, and a kitchen running twenty other tickets does not have any to give.

Where It Came From

Takoyaki is younger than people assume, and it started as something else.

A man named Tomekichi Endo, originally from Aizu in Fukushima, was running a stall in Osaka in 1933 selling radioyaki, made in the same pan and the same way but filled with beef sinew and konnyaku. The name was a joke about how modern it was. Radios were the new thing, so this was the new thing.

In 1935 a customer told him that over in Akashi they put octopus in theirs. Akashiyaki, which is eggier and softer and gets dipped in dashi rather than sauced, was already its own dish there. Endo took the idea, put octopus and egg into his radioyaki, and called the result takoyaki.

His shop was called Aizuya, after the region he came from, and he built his dashi on the seasoning of kozuyu, a Fukushima soup he grew up with. So the dish that is now shorthand for Osaka got its octopus from a stranger's offhand comment and its broth from a homesick man's memory of somewhere else entirely.

There Is No Single Correct Takoyaki

Regions do it differently and they are not doing it wrong.

Akashi still eats akashiyaki floating in dashi. Plenty of places serve takoyaki that way too, dunked rather than sauced, which is closer to the original than the version with sauce and mayonnaise on top. Some cooks grate yamaimo, Japanese mountain yam, into the batter, which makes the inside gooier and is the move if that molten center is what you are chasing.

If somebody tells you there is one right way to make it, they mean there is one right way where they are from.

What Izakayas Actually Serve

Here is the part that explains our menu.

Izakayas in Japan do serve takoyaki. It is usually not fresh from the pan. It is agetakoyaki, fried takoyaki, dropped into oil to order.

That is not a shortcut somebody invented to cheat you. It is the format solving a real problem. An izakaya is built to send a lot of small plates out of one kitchen quickly, and a station that ties up a cook for the length of one order breaks that. Frying gets you a hot, crisp, molten-centered ball in a fraction of the time and without stopping everything else.

Ours is agetakoyaki. We are picky about what we buy, we blend our own sauce rather than pouring a bottle over it, and we have spent a genuinely stupid amount of time dialing in oil temperature and timing, because fried is where the inside goes rubbery if you are careless. Get it right and the shell crisps while the center stays soft. Get it wrong and you have served somebody a hot ball of dough.

That is what we do, and it is good, and it is honest about what it is.

Go See Karl

If you want proper takoyaki, made to order the way I described at the top, go find Karl. He runs KarlsBalls, and he does it as popups.

He is a friend, and I am not sending you to him to be gracious. He is the best in the city, hands down, and it is not close. He does the octopus, the hours of salt, the fresh batter, the pick, all of it, one ball at a time. When you have eaten takoyaki made that way you understand immediately why it comes from a stall and not from a kitchen line.

I take real pride in what leaves our pass. I also know what the labor on this dish is, and we cannot make every order individually while running the rest of the room. So we do the next best thing and make sure the thing we do is properly good.

If you want ours, it is on the menu. If you want the other kind, I will tell you where to go, and it is not here.