Okonomiyaki, As You Like It — A Few Words from Our Counter in Osaka
Hello, and welcome. My name is Yoshio Nakagawa. My sister and I run Pasania, a small restaurant in Nakanoshima, Osaka, as the third generation of our family. More and more of our guests now visit from overseas, so we wanted to write a few words about okonomiyaki — what it is, how it differs from place to place, and how we make ours. We hope this reads less like a menu description and more like a short walk through Osaka’s food culture, taken at an unhurried pace.
What okonomiyaki is
Okonomiyaki is often translated as a “savory pancake,” and while that gives you a rough picture, it sells the dish a little short. A well-made okonomiyaki — thick, tender, and gently risen — may remind you as much of a Spanish omelette or a soufflé as of any pancake. At its heart, it is a dish of wheat-flour batter — usually seasoned with dashi, the Japanese soup stock — combined with a generous amount of cabbage and other ingredients, then cooked patiently on a teppan, a flat iron griddle. It is finished with a sweet-savory sauce, and often with mayonnaise, aonori (green laver), and katsuobushi (bonito flakes) that sway in the rising heat.
The name itself is an invitation. Okonomi means “as you like,” and yaki means “grilled.” Pork, squid, shrimp, green onion, cheese, mochi — the dish has always been open to whatever the cook and the eater fancy. That openness, we think, is part of why it became such a beloved everyday food across Japan in the twentieth century, and why it remains one today.
A city that loves to eat
To understand okonomiyaki, it helps to know a little about the city around it. In the Edo period, Osaka was called tenka no daidokoro — “the nation’s kitchen” — because rice, kombu, and goods from all over Japan passed through its merchants’ warehouses. The kombu that arrived here by ship helped shape the gentle, fragrant dashi that still defines Kansai cooking. Osakans also speak, half-jokingly, of kuidaore: to eat oneself into ruin. It is an exaggeration, of course, but it tells you where the city’s heart has always been.
Out of this culture grew what locals call konamon — “flour things”: udon, takoyaki, and okonomiyaki among them. Inexpensive, warm, and cooked close to the eater, konamon is food without ceremony, but never without care. Okonomiyaki sits at the center of it — a dish where Osaka’s dashi culture and its griddle culture meet on one iron plate.
And the city has kept growing. Where goods from all over Japan once gathered, people and cuisines from all over the world now do. Once tenka no daidokoro, Osaka is quietly becoming a kitchen of the world.
Kansai and Hiroshima: two ways of building one dish
Travelers often ask which okonomiyaki is the “real” one — the Kansai style or the Hiroshima style. The honest answer is: both, fully. And here is a small surprise: according to the leading account among food historians, okonomiyaki was born in neither city. The dish, in the name and form we know today, is thought to have emerged in early twentieth-century Tokyo — and it was Osaka and Hiroshima that took it in, raised it in their own ways, and made it part of everyday life. A birthplace is one thing; a home is another.
In the Kansai style, found in Osaka and the surrounding region, everything is mixed before it meets the griddle. Cabbage, batter, egg, and fillings are folded together in a bowl, then poured and shaped as one round. The result is a soft, unified body where the ingredients melt into each other.
In the Hiroshima style, the elements are layered rather than mixed: a thin crepe of batter, then a mountain of cabbage and bean sprouts, pork, usually noodles, and an egg, all stacked and pressed on the griddle with remarkable skill. Each layer keeps its own character, and together they form something almost architectural.
Neither style is a variation of the other. Each grew up in its own city, with its own logic and its own loyal regulars. In both Osaka and Hiroshima, you will find counters filled with locals who have eaten at the same restaurant for decades, sitting beside travelers tasting okonomiyaki for the first time — and both leaving happy. In many okonomiyaki restaurants, the griddle is built into the counter or the table itself, so the dish is cooked, finished, and eaten in the same warm place. If your travels allow, we sincerely encourage you to try both styles.
Every restaurant has its own answer
Even within a single city, no two okonomiyaki restaurants taste quite the same. The ratio of the batter, the dashi behind it, how finely the cabbage is cut, the blend of the sauce, the heat of the griddle, the timing of the flip — each restaurant has refined these choices over its own history, often across generations of one family, and often without writing any of it down. There is no single “correct” okonomiyaki; there are thousands of good ones, each carrying the story of the people who make it. Meeting each restaurant’s particular answer is, to us, one of the quiet pleasures of eating in Japan.
How we make ours at Pasania
Pasania opened in 1965, and the two of us are the third generation to stand at its griddle, cooking the okonomiyaki we inherited from our parents.
Ours is, by design, a simple one. We build the batter on a vegetable dashi, and we cook each okonomiyaki slowly, taking more time than is usual, so that the cabbage turns sweet and the flavor of each ingredient comes through clearly. Nothing is there to impress; everything is there to taste. We finish it with our own Wonderful Sauce, brewed in kioke — the large traditional wooden barrels long used in Japanese fermentation. It is the taste our parents handed to us, and the one we hope to hand on in turn.
Pasania has also long kept close company with wine — today our cellar is devoted to Japanese wine. Over the years, our counter has had the honor of welcoming people who make wine or live by it: winemakers such as Marcel Lapierre, Pierre Overnoy, Philippe Pacalet, Stanko Radikon, and Lorenzo Corino, as well as chefs, sommeliers, and the owners of restaurants and wine bars from Japan and abroad. We take heart from this — not as a boast, but as a reminder that a dish as unassuming as okonomiyaki can hold the attention of people who have spent their lives in pursuit of taste. They sat where our neighborhood regulars sit, and ate the same okonomiyaki.
Beyond the griddle
If okonomiyaki brings you to Osaka, we hope it will be a doorway rather than a destination. Japanese food culture is profoundly regional: the dashi changes between east and west, the soy sauce and the miso change their color as you travel, the noodles change, and every region keeps dishes that rarely cross its borders. Osaka is as good a place to begin as any — but it is only a beginning.
We would be glad to welcome you at our counter. And more than that, we hope you leave Japan having tasted how wonderfully different one small country can be from town to town.