The Joy of Okonomiyaki in Hiroshima: Eating Around Okonomimura

Okonomiyaki is one of my favorite Japanese foods. With two delicious regional styles found in Hiroshima and Osaka, this hearty, savory pancake packs a ton of flavor and really sticks to your ribs. It’s a great way to start a night out or end a long day of work, and at Okonomimura in Hiroshima, you can find just about every kind of topping or twist on Hiroshima-style okonomiyaki that the coastal city has to offer. Located in the bustling commercial district of Hondori, this maze of grills boasts three floors dedicated to Peace City’s most famous delicacy.

Unless you spend a lot of time online reading about food (thanks, by the way!), you may not be particularly familiar with okonomiyaki, which hasn’t quite made it big in the U.S. outside of a handful of specialty restaurants mostly on the West Coast. This savory pancake’s centuries-old lineage has its roots in Buddhist tradition as a specialized desert before eventually becoming something resembling the regional delicacy it is today when wartime rationing caused staple foods to become scarce, forcing people to use different ingredients and techniques when cooking.

A portmanteau of Okonomi (what you like) and Yaki (grilled), it literally means, “What you like, grilled.” As such, there’s no one ‘correct’ way to make okonomiyaki. Think of it like a regional hot dog, where the core of the dish stays pretty consistent, but the toppings and preparation might vary. Two regions of Japan lay claim to okonomiyaki as we know it today: The pancake dish found in Osaka (and the Kansai region overall) consists of a thicker pancake with everything mixed into one layer, but in Hiroshima, you’ll find a very thin layer of pancake at the bottom with each ingredient and topping layered on top in a specific order. Batter, powdered bonito, cabbage, fried tempura bits, green onions, bean sprouts, thin-sliced pork, soba noodles, egg, umami-sweet-savory Okonomi sauce, and shaved seaweed make up the core of Hiroshima-style okonomiyaki, but there’s a lot of variance here.

In my time eating across Okonomimura’s myriad stands, extra green onions, tempura squid, kimchi, cheese, oysters (another specialty of Hiroshima ), mayo, and the option to swap out soba for udon; a much thicker, chewier noodle were by far the most popular extras I encountered, with most stands offering each of these options alongside other toppings like rice cake, garlic, shrimp, egg and pickled greens.

But Okonomimura boasts dozens of shops, all serving their own versions of the dish. It’d be hard to try every single one. Still, I did my best. Save one pancake which I made myself in a cooking class, every okonomiyaki that I ate in Hiroshima was within this mall’s tight corridors, seated at petite stools, minding my elbow room as locals and other tourists alike ate their pancake off the grill.

Eating okonomiyaki fresh off the grill where it was cooked keeps it nice and hot, even after your chef’s done flipping, scraping, and preening everything into a perfect mountain of food. Once it’s ready, they’ll place it in front of you and hand you a small trowel-like spatula. From there, it’s up to you to use this scraper to chop up your piled-on pancake into bite-sized pieces—unless your chef generously chops it up for you like mine did at Daimarudou—before transferring it to a plate and letting it cool a bit before eating.

At first glace, there isn’t as much variation as you’d expect there might be between different shops. Most use the same thin-shredded cabbage, the same savory-sweet Otafuku-brand sauce, and the same grated bonito and seaweed. But the devil’s in the details: Where one shop might use thinner strips of pork belly, lending it a lighter flavor and letting the cabbage’s bite stand out a bit more, its neighbor could use thicker slices, giving it a much more luxurious, rich flavor thanks to all that tasty pork fat stored in the belly. Different cooks on the noodles can also be a game changer, as the soba noodles used for okonomiyaki usually come pre-cooked, so they only need a minute before they’re ready to be seasoned and grilled. For my money, the thinner noodles are the best since they have much more surface area to soak up flavor from other layers in the pancake and to get extra cook on them from the grill. The soba never quite gets properly crispy the way a fried noodle might, but they do get slightly tougher and pick up some flavor from the grill all the same.

I think my favorite individual dish came from Daimarudou. Their ‘Wafu Special’ was loaded up with local pickled greens, rice cakes and cheese. The cheese was on my request because I hadn’t had it on okonomiyaki up to that point. The pickled greens really lifted up the cabbage and helped cut through the rich, chewy rice cake and cheese. Admittedly, putting the cheese and rice cake together might have been a mistake: Both trap heat exceedingly well, so it took me ages to eat mine and I still burned myself a handful of times. But if you’ve ever had perfectly chewy rice cakes before, you know exactly how luxurious this okonomiyaki was.

It’s also spectacular drinking food. Whether you’re sipping a cold, heady draft beer or a crisp, refreshing Lemon Sour, okonomiyaki’s umami flavors and high temperature make it impossible to resist a cold drink as it sweats next to the grill. It begs to be enjoyed with a beer—no matter what time of day it is. On an early lunchtime solo trip to a stand called Itsukushima, a couple of guys were just polishing off their steaming lunch with empty beer mugs next to them. Naturally, I ordered one too. I’d have been foolish not to do as the locals did, right?

Which reminds me: Although a majority of Japan is incredibly easy for English speakers to navigate with little or no Japanese skills, it’s best to make the most out of whatever prep time you have before heading across the Pacific. Hiroshima sees lots of international tourism in two very specific places, with some overflow into places like Okonomimura, but not all stands will have English menus. And no matter how advanced Google Translate’s image-recognition capabilities have become, nobody wants to have a camera in their face as they’re cooking because you can’t read the menu behind them. Even just a little bit of preparedness can really make your experience better when traveling, but especially when you’re as close to the person preparing your food as you will be at Okonomimura.