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I went for okonomiyaki for lunch today, for the first time in several months. Now, of course, this being Hiroshima, okonomiyaki means Hiroshima okonomiyaki. (Hiroshima people can get quite irate if you say ‘Hiroshima-style okonomiyaki’, so I won’t, but that’s what it was.) It’s very different to Kansai okonomiyaki. This being Hiroshima, I wouldn’t dare say anything other than that I prefer the Hiroshima version to the Kansai version, but actually, that happens to be the truth.

In case you don’t know, Hiroshima okonomiyaki is basically layers of things fried. It varies depending on the region, but generally, there’s a thin crepe base, a large pile of cabbage, noodles, bean sprouts, and pork slices. The whole is topped with a thin omelette. Quite often there are extra ingredients inside the layers too. For example, one of the people I went with had cheese and kimchi.

It’s quite traditional to eat it on a teppan, which is like a hot plate. At the restaurant I went to, Magokoro Days (a very good place, by the way) they serve the okonomiyaki on a hot metal disc the size of a dinner plate (you can see it in the photo above), and you eat directly from that. So it’s still hot while you’re eating it. And who knows? Maybe it even continues to cook a little.

There’s only one negative point about okonomiyaki. That’s the fact that your clothes smell of cooking oil so strongly after eating it. Today I wasn’t wearing anything formal, so it was okay, but had I been wearing a suit and tie, I think I would have thought twice about going. Unfortunately, the smell does linger.

I’ll tell you what, if anyone came up with a reliable way of cooking okonomiyaki so that the smell doesn’t linger on your clothes, they’d make an absolute killing!