Over the next month, Osaka restaurants will start preparing some award-winning dishes to serve up to lucky diners.
The event is called Delice Restaurant Week, but the use of the word "week" is a bit of a misnomer. The event runs from Feb. 22 until March 17 at some 30 restaurants in Osaka and neighboring cities.
Organizers boast that the best ingredients from across Japan will be used and that when combined with the cooking techniques of chefs in Osaka, the city that's referred to as the "kitchen of Japan," the results are bound to be delicious.
Delice is the name of a gourmet city network established out of Lyon, France, in 2007. Currently 18 cities in the world are Delice members and Osaka is the only Asian city, according the Osaka Chamber of Commerce, a co-organizer of the event.
To promote Osaka cuisine, the city has held annual food contests in which local chefs competed with one another by creating original dishes. During Delice Restaurant Week, those local chefs who joined contests in 2011 and 2012, will cook and serve 34 award-winning menus.
One of the restaurants featured is Sankirai at the Minoh Sanso Hotel in the city of Minoh. The restaurant's chef, Kimitsugu Kawasaki, won first place in the Western food division of the contest last year, with a dish of gallete topped with sea bream and scallop. The dish is a part of a ¥6,300 course menu. The restaurant Xiang-fu at the Hanshin Hotel is offering a dish of Osaka duck by chef Nao Ichimoto. That dish won top prize in the Chinese and Asian Cuisine division in the contest last year. The dish is part of a ¥4,000 course menu.
The aim here isn't so much to serve the dishes at low prices, it's more to celebrate the award-winning creations of Osaka all in one go.
Delice Restaurant Week takes place at various restaurants in Osaka Prefecture. For more information call the Osaka Chamber of Commerce at (06) 6944-6493 or visit www.osaka-info.jp/drw2013 (in Japanese).