I think the translation of kuidaore on Jim Breen’s online Japanese dictionary is pretty funny:
食い倒れ 【くいだおれ】 (n) bringing ruin upon oneself by extravagance in food
But really, this is exactly what it means. The verb kuu 食う is a sort of informal way of saying “eat,” while the daore 倒れ part can mean either the financial or physical collapse of a person. So put more idiomatically, kuidaore means “eat till you drop” or “eat yourself out of house and home.” And this is exactly what you’re expected to do in the bustling city of Osaka, a consumer’s paradise often referred to as Japan’s second city, and also as tenka no daidokoro 天下の台所 – the nation’s kitchen.
In true viking fashion, kuidaore is the mantra I adopted on my trip there last weekend. Actually, to be more accurate, my mantra was more like kuinomitsuiyashidaore 食い飲み費やし倒れ – I ate, drank, and spent till I could eat, drink, and spend no more, collapsing into a capsule hotel, bloated with food, staggering drunk, and on the bullet train to brokesville. But can you blame me? Osaka offers an awful lot to take in.
