Daimaru Shinsaibashi's basement food hall gets a new tenant: Delica Kitchen's 20th store

Chubu Foods, a wholly owned subsidiary of Valor Holdings, said it will open its 20th Delica Kitchen store in the basement prepared-foods section of Daimaru Shinsaibashi's main building on 9 September, according to a release the company issued. Delica Kitchen is a fried and prepared-foods specialist selling items such as chicken-and-rice bowls and miso-glazed young chicken; the new shop will run from 10am to 8pm daily, closed only on 1-2 January.

To mark the opening, Chubu Foods will sell a limited daily quantity of a fried-shrimp bento with two large shrimp for ¥980, tax included, from 9 to 13 September, the company said.

The change lands the same week Daimaru's parent, J. Front Retailing, released its own August sales for the department-store business — a reminder that a depachika (the basement food hall) tenant list turns over on its own clock, largely independent of how the department store's overall trading is going. A twentieth store also says something about the chain itself: Delica Kitchen has grown store by store on the strength of a fairly narrow prepared-foods edit, rather than the single big-format bet that usually earns a department store's own press release. For Daimaru Shinsaibashi, the food floor's job doesn't change with each new tenant: it is to keep giving shoppers a reason to detour through the basement, before or instead of going upstairs.