I love okonomiyaki.
if you don’t know what that is, wikipedia is your friend.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Okonomiyaki
A quick summary would be, it’s a pancake like dish served in two main styles, Osaka style (kansai) and Hiroshima style. (I don’t count Monjakayi – http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monjayaki – it’s just a mess)
Having just been to Hiroshima, I’ve now sampled both and the grand debate over which is better can now be settled, once and for all.
Osaka style
With Osaka style you do it yourself, mixing a prepared bowl of ingredients together and then slapping it on the hot plate in a pancake type way. Turning it over once in a while you cook it until it’s as brown as you wish it to be, then take it off, sprinkle fish bits and seaweed on it, as well as a nice coating of okonomiyaki special sauce (which I hate) and mayonnaise.
The sauce is the apparent key to it all, as an amazed shop owner asked me ’本当に美味しい？’, which I translate as ‘You eat it without the sauce? Disgusting, surely?’.
My favourite has to be octopus (タコ), closely followed by a cheese version (チーズ), and a pizza version (ピザ). The last one may only come from my local okonomiyaki place, I don’t know. It’s nice thou.
Hiroshima style
In Hiroshima they don’t mix the ingredients and, by default, layer it with soba noodles. I don’t like soba noodles however they do a version with udon noodles which was better for me. Again, no sauce as it’s horrid, although the end result tends to be a bit dry unless you have it. However, mayonnaise came to the rescue and made for a tasty meal. You can mix and match ingredients as you like, with a similar range of toppings as with the Osaka style. However they cook it for you due to the layering of ingredients which would make it a bit tricky for the customers to do it themselves. As a local specialty on top of a specialty, you can have a oyster one too, which my Japanese friend spooged himself over.
Behind the Parco department store in Hiroshima is the I presume famous okonomiyaki village. There are 4 floors of nothing but okonomiyaki shops (maybe 40 or so in total), all bustling for your attention in a clearly overcrowded market like arena. However none of them seemed to do the oyster version, which a shop a door or two down on the first floor did (the one in the photo).
Overall, which do I prefer?
Osaka style wins. You cook it yourself, which is fun, and it’s moister and comes in a few more varieties as far as I can tell. Maybe I’m just not a fan of the noodles I suppose, although I’m sure if the sauce wasn’t so unpalatable to me things might be different.
If you are in Japan, please go sample some okonomiyaki. There are chain stores all around Tokyo as well as a similar number of private establishments.
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