Okonomiyaki

Friday was the last night that Jeremy's parents were in town and they offered to take everyone out to dinner and karaoke. Matt and Candise headed off to Kyoto, so they weren't available but Dan and I went. Jeremy also invited one of his classmates, Haruna. She was very cool and an invaluable translator for us at the restaurant. I'm sure we would have muddled through, but having her there was great. Plus she was a lot of fun.

Here's a pic of Haruna and Dan...


























Jeremy had heard about an okonomiyaki place in Harajuku. The people who own the apartment he lives in apparently run the restaurant as well so we wound our way through some of the narrow back streets of Harajuku until we found it.


























Yes, that's what we came for!

Okonomiyaki is, for lack of a better term, a Japanese pancake though it isn't really pancake-like at all. It comes in a bowl with a mix of meat and vegetables which you scoop out onto the tabletop grill and let it cook for a while, then pour in the liquid portion. The liquid is either some type of batter or a more liquid sauce loaded with corn starch so it starts to thicken as you eat it.

Here is how it comes to the table:















And after you mix it up a bit, you dump it onto the grill like so...(sorry if part of this is sideways...)



And then you put the bacon on top. Is there anything that isn't made better by putting bacon it?















After it cooks for a while, you flip it:




Then you crack an egg on the grill and let it cook sunny side up. After a bit, you flip the okonomiyaki onto the egg, let them cook together and the flip one last time.















At this point you take a relatively healthy dish and slather it with barbeque sauce, mayonnaise, bonito flakes and some ground seaweed, so the finished product looks like this:















And as you can see, you quickly begin to cut it up and eat it at this point.

We liked the first two okonomiyaki so much we ordered two more.

Here is some video of the Mexican style mon-ja cooking next to our first okonomiyaki




After dinner we had crepes (sorry, no pictures) and went to karaoke:















And then parted ways after profusely thanking Jeremy's parents for dinner. Free stuff rocks, especially in Tokyo!

As I made my way home to Takadanobaba (referred to as Baba from this point forward) I was waylaid by some dormmates and forced to go drinking at an English pub:








































And Rory seemed to be having some luck:















But this look is really saying, "this girl is cute and I might have a chance, but why won't she take her hat off? Is she bald? This disturbs me."

So instead of being in bed by midnight I was out until 3am. These things happen sometimes.