You think Osaka's signature food is takoyaki.
Or okonomiyaki.
It's a pork bun.
It's called butaman.
The shop is 551 Horai.
They sell about 170,000 of them a day.
They've been doing it for almost 80 years.
But here's what's strange: in 80 years, the company has never opened a permanent shop outside the Kansai region.
People have asked the company why they don't expand to Tokyo.
The answer is always the same.
The dough has to ferment within 150 minutes of leaving the factory.
Anywhere further away, the buns wouldn't taste right.
So they don't sell there.
They know the buns sell.
They know how to expand.
They just don't.
The bun itself is bigger than you'd expect.
Lots of pork, lots of onion, slightly sweet dough.
They call it butaman, not nikuman, because in Kansai dialect, the word for "meat" defaults to beef.
So if they called it a "meat bun," people would think it had beef in it.
They specified pork in the name.
The history is older than you'd guess.
The company opened in October 1945, two months after the war ended, in a part of Osaka that had been firebombed to the ground.
The founder was a Taiwanese immigrant named Luo Bangqiang.
He started with a small restaurant that sold curry rice.
The pork bun came later, in 1946, when he adapted a Taiwanese recipe to Osaka tastes.
A Taiwanese man invented the most Osakan food there is, in a city that still didn't have homes for everyone.
Ride the bullet train out of Osaka today, and you'll see at least one person carrying a red and white paper bag.