Japan is still in recession, and people are now refraining from dining out these days, but I tend to eat out from time to time. Of course, having a meal at home is economical, but in the end ordinary people can't cook as good as chefs, so we need to dine out to have something really good once in a while. And I went to an Okonomiyaki restaurant the other day for lunch.
This restaurant is called "Okonomiyaki-honpo" and started its business last year in my city. I was a bit surprised to see this old lady put in front of the shop, but what matters the most is the taste, right? The meaning of "honpo" would be "the original shop".
Upon taking a seat, I ordered a "drink bar", which allows customers to have unlimited amount of drinks, and of course I wanted to try the iced coffee at this shop. As the first picture shows, the weather wasn't good and it was cold, but I like to have something cold in the winter like I said before. You can see a hot plate, on which cooking oil is already spread.
You can have these as side dishes. The left is called "Osumashi", which basically tastes like light soy sauce. And the right one is shredded Japanese radish, on which you can see "Kaiware", or sprouted seeds of Japanese radish.
And as you know, this is a rice ball. When we buy one at a supermarket it costs about 1 us dollars or less, and the stomach of the Japanese people would be filled with a few rice balls. If you're too hungry, they might not be enough, but we often have some for lunch.
And this is an Okonomiyaki bowl. You can see pieces of pork, shrimps, some squid, and the yellow stuff under them is shredded cabbage dredged in flour. They are all raw.
After mixing those things in the bowl except for the pork, you should put on the hot plate everything with the pork on top of it and wait for a few minutes until one side is toasted. You should turn it over to toast the other side as well.
After the surfaces of both sides are toasted enough to be crispy, you should put the Okonomiyaki on your saucer. Usually people like to put on the surface "Okonomiyaki sauce", mayonnaise, and green laver powder. "Okonomiyaki sauce" tastes like Worcester sauce, but the former is a bit sweeter. You might think this tastes like "Takoyaki", but basically you can put in the bowl anything you like, and in this respect, Okonomiyaki differs from Takoyaki.
Okonomiyaki is one of my favorites. Like Takoyaki, this originated in Osaka, but people in the Kanto region also like to have this. This is more expensive (about 10 us dollars or 7.5 euros) than Takoyaki, but we have this as a meal, while Takoyaki is basically had as a snack.
