Kai Oh Maru 海王丸 Sakae-shi Osaka
Kai Oh Maru 海王丸 Sakae-shi Osaka
In one of the most unexpected places to find a local hot spring, we stumbled upon a restaurant for our lunch at Sakae-shi, Osaka. We were in the quest of locating Kuramae Onsen Sassa no Yu at this small town of Sakae-shi.
A typical street at Kuramae-cho, Osaka.
The journey took us 40 minutes from Umeda Station to Kitahanada station and it will take another 20 minutes of walking to the hot spring. In between we found a restaurant for a quick lunch. It was not a fancy restaurant but they have very friendly staffs.
The Kai Oh Maru 海王丸 restaurant.
The Kai Oh Maru 海王丸 restaurant’s interior.
It is a cozy Japanese style restaurant and none of them speaks English. However, they translated to English on the mobile phones on the food available.
The tempura, sorry we didn’t know what was it called.
To make things easier for both of us, we ordered the Tempura Set. The tempura set comes with prawn and vegetable tempura with sashimi tuna fish and cuttlefish with miso soup, pickles and rice.
This was neither any fancy nor glorious but it was delicious. On our traveling experiences in Kansai area of Japan, we found out that most of the food is delicious.
The waiters tried to communicate with us and we did chat a bit via sign languages. To our surprise, they treated us four pieces of fresh sashimi shrimps. It cost about 100 yen for each shrimp. It was complimentary from the staffs, how nice of them!
Sashimi shrimps!
As we wanted to taste the shrimp, it moved! The shrimps were still alive! That was our first time having such dish and it was really an eye opener. How could we eat something which was alive?
Watch the video on how the shrimps moved.
Another view, the shrimps were still alive, omg.
After 10 or 15 minutes of decision, we decided to end their sorrows. This is definitely not for Buddhists! We had to detached the head and dipped onto the soy sauce with wasabi. Even detaching the head, the legs were still moving, gross!
Seafood chawan mushi.
Lastly, we had the seafood chawan mushi. One of the best so far we had in a very long time. Overall the prices were reasonable and the friendly staffs waved goodbye for our quest to find the local onsen (hot spring). We will share our first time onsen experience next week and how difficult for us to go naked with the locals.
Kai Oh Maru 海王丸 Address and Map:
1502, Kuramae-cho , Kita-ku, Sakae-shi,
591-8004
Tel: 072-257-7011