Japanese Soul Food

By Jennifer Moss

Photo by Philip Solman

In Vancouver, sushi joints compete with Starbucks for pretty much every corner within city limits. But sometimes in the raw months, tucking into a plate of raw fish just seems a bit, well, cold.

Thankfully, for fans of Japanese food, there are a few places in town where you can get okonomiyaki, the ultimate Japanese soul food.

This dish is perfect for the dead of winter, when you want a little something that will stick to your ribs. “Okonomiyaki is the anti-Atkins food,” says Vancouver radio broadcaster and comedian Tetsuro Shigematsu. “It’s hearty country fare. People think of Japanese food as delicate—and some of it is a bit of an acquired taste. But okonomiyaki is like the butter chicken of Japanese food. It’s totally accessible. People tend to like it the first time they try it.”

Okonomiyaki is an example of teppanyaki, or food fried on a hot metal plate. Okonomi means “as you like,” and yaki means “fry.” Some people compare okonomiyaki to pizza, except there’s no cheese, crust, or pizza sauce. So forget that. Think instead of a frittata crossed with a savoury pancake, with pretty much anything you like thrown in, served on a bed of yakisoba noodles and drizzled with special sauce. Lots of special sauce. This kind of crepe has been popular in Japan since the late 1930s, and there is speculation that it has its roots in the tea ceremonies of the late 1500s.

The basic components of okonomiyaki are batter, roughly chopped cabbage, grated yamaimo (Japanese mountain yam), green onion, diced vegetables, and meat or seafood, all fried up as a deliciously sloppy griddle cake. “Every family has their way of making it,” says Shigematsu, who admits his own mom made okonomiyaki with “a bag of those little chopped-up frozen vegetables.” He adds, “But I always liked it when we had it at home because the whole family would sit down together and share it.” And according to Shigematsu, “Ordering this dish at a restaurant shows that you have a real knowledge of Japanese food. You’re stepping out past California roll. If you’re with a Japanese person, they’ll be impressed.”

In Vancouver, unless your mom makes it, okonomiyaki is a bit elusive. There are a few restaurants in town that have it on the menu however, and you can get it at the annual Powell Street Festival. In Japan, it’s a different story. There are entire restaurants dedicated solely to okonomiyaki, many of them places where you’re given the raw ingredients and you can design and grill your own, just to your taste. Shigematsu, who studied Butoh dance in Japan in the mid-nineties, says wistfully, “There was this great okonomiyaki place near Ueno Park in Tokyo. They had loads of different kinds. I used to see all these construction labourers lining up there for the okonomiyaki. All those carbs—it really fills you up. And it’s great value, yen-for-yen.”

And of course, leave it to the Japanese to build a robot that makes okonomiyaki. The Motoman SDA10, made by Osaka’s Toyo Riki Company, is designed to operate alongside humans in the workplace. But so far it mainly demonstrates its talents by flipping okonomiyaki with the deft touch of an obasan (grandmother) in various Youtube videos. The choice of okonomiyaki as the robot’s demo food is no accident. It’s seen as a home-cooked, domestic, heartwarmingly human dish, so what better way to illustrate the anthropomorphic qualities of a robot? And speaking of Youtube, for a bizarre-yet-thorough hands-on demonstration of how to make okonomiyaki, click on “cooking with dog—okonomiyaki” and a very nice lady with a poodle will give you step-by-step instructions. Discerning viewers may want to try comparing the poodle’s okonomiyaki with the robot’s … a close race, by any standards.

In Vancouver, we may not have an okonomiyaki robot, but we do have Riuya Terada. He’s the chef at the highly original Clubhouse Japanese restaurant down at 255 West 2nd Avenue. Terada grew up in Osaka and learned to make okonomiyaki from his mom. “She was from another city, so she made it differently, with pork or beef slices in it. But here, I make the Osaka style of okonomiyaki,” says the slight 26 year old as he emerges from the kitchen, sporting a white T-shirt that says “I Love Me”—a reference to his favourite Japanese recording artist, Kazuyoshi Saito. The shirt is quirky, as is this landmark restaurant, decorated wildly with twinkling faerie lights and large, incongruous golf posters. It’s an experience not to be missed.

Terada, a trained sushi chef, was recruited by the Clubhouse and brought to Canada in part because of his skill in the okonomiyaki department. He serves up a large, moist, and filling okonomiyaki stuffed with veggies, chicken, or seafood. Washed down by a cold beer, it’s the perfect après-ski dinner, or hearty hangover lunch. The key to this okonomiyaki is the sauce, and it’s a bit of a trade secret. It’s somewhere between Worcestershire sauce and oyster sauce, with maybe a little sugar and soy sauce thrown in, but nobody at the Clubhouse is talking.

Meanwhile, if you want a slightly more upscale pancake, there’s always Guu, a fantastic Japanese tapas restaurant with locations on Robson, Thurlow, in Gastown and in Richmond. They have a nice okonomiyaki on their appetizer menu, a little bit less hearty than the Clubhouse version, topped with tasty bonito flakes and beautifully presented. It’s hardly the signature dish of the restaurant, but it makes a nice change from the negitoro.

If you feel inspired to make okonomiyaki at home, the grated yamaimo that goes into the batter can be found at various Asian grocery stores, depending on the season. Sunrise Market at 300 East Pender usually has it, and so does T&T Supermarket. Plus, you can buy a pretty good bottled okonomiyaki sauce at Fujiya Japanese food store on the corner of Clark and Venables.

Like anything, making okonomiyaki takes practice. Cook it too long and it’s a blackened mess of starch. Undercook it and it falls apart. But then again, we’re talking about soul food. It doesn’t have to be perfect. It just has to be yummy. Drizzle a little sweet Japanese mayo and some pickled ginger on top, and voilà. And the real beauty of this dish is that there’s no right way of making it. Just try not to drink too much beer before you cook it.

Jen Moss loves any food that is high in carbs and yumminess. Okonomiyaki is right up there. When she’s not scarfing down Japanese food, Jen works as a freelance writer and broadcaster in Vancouver. Her work has appeared in The Vancouver Sun, The Georgia Straight, and on CBC radio.