I’m going to stick my neck out here and say that Takoyaki Master, a new, bright sunshine yellow stand in the Arndale Food Market, is serving the best takoyaki in town. OK, it might be the only takoyaki in town, currently. But even if it wasn’t, it would still probably be the best.
Argue with that logic all you like, I’m not budging on it. Takoyaki originally comes from Osaka, and emerged in the middle of the 1930s as a street food snack, sold by vendors brandishing pans dented with hemispherical moulds, into which you pour batter and then diced octopus. They’re then nudged around with a chopstick until you create a delicate round ball of crispy-chewy deliciousness.
The result sits somewhere between a pancake and a dumpling, and who in their right mind doesn’t like either or - in the vast majority of cases - both of those things passionately? According to Pong Ho, who owns Takoyaki Master with his wife Vivien, in Tokyo they prefer them crispy on the outside and soft on the inside, whereas in Osaka, they prefer a chewier final dumpling.
