I am back from Japan! It was four full days – and when I say full, I mean full. Sometimes vacations can be tougher than work, my feet are still recovering! So for our first day in Osaka, we decided to risk our lives, haha. We both have not tried fugu before and this was the day to try it. Yes, fugu contains tetrodotoxin and can cause asphyxiation…no big deal right? Okay, it’s somewhat of a big deal. But we found a popular restaurant, Zuboraya, and I knew we would be in good hands.

Fugu Sushi Combination • ¥1,300

Benntenn Course • ¥5,400

Two kinds of seasonal appetizer, raw puffer fish sashimi, puffer fish hot pot, puffer fish deep fried, zosui (rice added to the hot pot broth at the end, they also add raw egg!), seasonal fruit.

These are the two seasonal appetizers. They were interesting…the blue dish tasted like a crunchy part of the fish. Perhaps some type of cartilage or skin? The green sauce was sweet, almost tasted like a dessert. The yellow dish has a tofu-like dish that tasted a bit like coconut milk. Probably our least favorite part of the meal…

Fugu sashimi! Interesting texture, a bit chewy. The taste? Not much really, they serve it with a yuzu ponzu dipping sauce and the yuzu taste is quite strong.

Deep fried fugu, it comes with about four pieces of fugu (not boneless, so be careful), fried potatoes, shishito pepper and red bell pepper. The fish nuggets were delicious!

Here are the contents of the fugu hot pot, sorry I didn’t get a shot of it cooking! It didn’t look too impressive anyway…tasted good!

Raw egg, rice, and toppings ready for some zosui action!

The waitress cooks it for you – this was delicious! It was actually one of my favorite parts of the meal, it’s a shame it’s in the end because we were already full so we couldn’t finish it!

Seasonal fruit to finish off the meal, Japanese strawberries? Yes please!! They were so nice and sweet, perfect way to end the meal. I liked that this restaurant also gave you iced water to start automatically, they must cater to foreign visitors. And let me tell you, Osaka was FULL of foreign visitors.