Before setting off for Japan, we’d downloaded an app recommended by Trailfinders onto our mobiles designed to provide maps, restaurants, places of interest etc. But whilst three out of the four of us are pretty IT literate, we’d not really made much use of it until we were browsing restaurants in Osaka and came across “Shinsaibashi Madras 5”:https://www.facebook.com/pages/Shinsaibashi-Madras-5/378654498858458. It was described as ‘very popular Japanese curry restaurant with a large choice of toppings to adapt to your taste and English menu available’.
It sounded perfect as we’re all partial to a ‘ruby’ as we’d say in London, yet we’d still be eating authentic traditional cuisine.
Although it was pouring with rain, we decided to do a recce in the afternoon as it was near our hotel. Despite having a map we struggled to find it and walked up and down various parallel streets. We were on the point of giving up, when we found it and booked a table for later that evening.
It was a casual restaurant with large wooden tables. From the English menu we chose a variety of curries including chicken, vegetable, double beef, chicken and tomato and pork cutlets which seemed slightly out of place. We had a mix of both brown and white rice and waited to see what arrived – unfortunately the Japanese don’t do poppadoms or bhajis to munch on but on our table we had a selection of tiny pickled vegetables.
The young girl who served us was absolutely delightful and made us feel very welcome.
The food arrived on huge large oval plates so we commandeered the next table as it wasn’t busy. The pork cutlets were the surprising winner being crisp, hot and crunchy as the curries were relatively spicy but had a slightly sweet taste. However, it provided a good diversion from raw fish, miso soup and tofu.
The portions were a good size and not too huge and very soon all our plates were empty. There was no wine so we had a Kirin beers including a rather unusual mango flavoured one.
Our total bill came to ¥6500 (around £10 a head) and we all agreed it had been worth getting wet for.
