Six on a Tray

Nobody warns you about the bonito flakes. You get a tray of six takoyaki, still radiating heat, and these paper-thin strips of dried fish just start undulating in the steam like something alive. It’s unsettling for about half a second. Then you bite in and the shell cracks and the inside is somehow both liquid and doughy at the same time, and there’s the octopus, and you stop caring about anything else.

I love takoyaki in a way that feels slightly embarrassing to examine. In Japan they’re festival food—you find them at matsuri stands, six to a tray, eaten standing up while something loud plays in the background. The correct technique is to eat them too hot, burning the roof of your mouth, washing it down with something cold pulled from the nearest vending machine. The suffering is built into the experience and somehow part of the appeal.

Eater shot a video at Otafuku, a Japanese spot on Manhattan’s Lower East Side, watching the kitchen produce what is probably the best version of it available anywhere in the United States. Watching someone make takoyaki—rotating the half-spheres in a cast-iron mold with a pick, coaxing the batter around the octopus chunk, building the crust—is its own small satisfaction. It looks meditative. It looks like something I would immediately ruin if I tried to replicate it at home.