A dish that helps give Japan flavor
Okonomiyaki eateries thrive across the country
Yoshihiro Ueuchi, who works for sauce maker Otafuku, shows visitors to Hiroshima’sWood Egg how to make okonomiyaki.
HIROSHIMA, Japan — It’s midday on a Thursday and Yoshihiro Ueuchi is preparing to preach some culinary gospel.
He puts on a white garrison cap embroidered with his name, sound-checks his microphone headset, and picks up his hera, or spatula. Arrayed around two pooltableteppanyaki grills, 18 acolytes in orange aprons stand expectantly, ready to be baptized in the basics of okonomiyaki.
The hot metal hisses as Ueuchi ladles a simple waterbatter onto the surface, swirling it into a perfect disk. Next comes a heapingmoundof shredded cabbage, piled up like amini Mt. Fuji. Thengreen onions, bean sprouts and thick slices of pork belly.
“Temperature control is important!” advisesUeuchi, telling his disciples to pump up the heat to 300 degrees Fahrenheit from 260 degrees as he adds egg, noodles and other ingredients, then finally drenches the mass in a thick, sweet, Worcestershire-inspired sauce. The 54-year-old should know: Ueuchi estimates he’s cooked 100,000 okonomiyaki in his 30 years of working for Otafuku, the biggest okonomiyaki sauce maker in theworld.
Part omelet, part crepe, okonomiyaki (pronounced oh-ko-no-mi-yaki) is to Hiroshima what deep-dish pizza is to Chicago. Layered like a lasagna, it is as customizable as its Italian cousin and is as much a part of this Japanese port’s identity as its notoriety as the first city to be hit by a nuclear weapon.
In fact, the dropping of the bomb and the rise of okonomiyaki are intimately linked in Hiroshima.
Before the war, the savory crepes — whose lineage can be traced to Chinese pancakes knownas jianbing— were sold as kids’ snacks throughout Hiroshima. Then, after 1945, war widows anxious to make ends meet started opening okonomiyaki stalls and some converted rooms in their homes into small restaurants.
They threw in whatever ingredients they could get their hands on, such as oysters and squid and soba noodles cooked by their fellow stall owners, along with ration ingredients provided by the U.S. occupiers. The elaborationwas allwell and good, because okonomiyaki literally means “whatever you like— grilled,” and in the lean years after the war, cheap one-dish meals were all many Hiroshimans could afford.
But even as Hiroshima started to get back onits feet in the 1950s, locals couldn’t shake their taste for okonomiyaki. SeiichiSasaki, who opened a vinegar shop in 1922 and later got into making Worcestershire sauce, smelled an opening and began canvassing Hiroshima, asking cooks howhis company could improve its products. After one chef complainedthatWorcestershire was too thin and always ran off his okonomiyaki, Sasaki took the idea back to his brewery and in 1952 launched his special sauce.
Nowadays, Otafuku pumps out 210,000 bottles of okonomiyaki sauce per day in Japan, along with an equal number of other bottles of condiments includingmayonnaise andvinegar. In fall 2013, the company opened a factory in Los Angeles, where Otafuku produces 140,000 gallons of sauce a year for the U.S. market under the brand name OtaJoy.
But company Naoyoshi Sasaki, President grandson of Otafuku’s founder, knows that his product is more niche than, say, ketchup or mustard. If the public were to lose its taste for okonomiyaki, his empire and his 600 employees would be in jeopardy. So Otafuku, he says, must relentlessly evangelize.
“We have to expand the culture of okonomiyaki, continually,” says Sasaki. “We have to educate people about it.”
For years, Otafuku has been holding demonstrations and seminars throughoutJapanat department stores and other venues, showing schoolchildren, homemakers and professional cooks how to make the dish. In 2008, it went a step further, commissioning a five-story okonomiyaki museum, shop and education center on the western side of Hiroshima, designed by architect Hiroshi Sambuichi.
The structure’s rounded form is designed to echo Hiroshima’s Atomic Bomb Dome, a landmark 1914 structure that survived the 1945 bombing. But that somber note is balanced by a lightness of form. Made of timber and vaguely shaped like an egg (a key okonomiyaki component), the building is known as the Wood Egg.
Ueuchi and others teach here, in multiple cooking studios — one for tourists, another for children and families, and a third for restaurateurs who want to openanokonomiyaki eatery or are planning to add the dish to the menu of their current establishment.
Otafuku keeps close tabs on the number of okonomiyaki restaurants. There are more than 1,000 in Hiroshima alone, which has a population of 1.2 million, but Osaka, which has its own distinct style of okonomiyaki and has 2.7 million people, cancall itself Japan’s okonomiyaki capital, with 2,850 eateries.
The statistics, though, hold some cause for concern: In 2009, there were 19,480 okonomiyaki restaurants across Japan by Otafuku’s count, but by 2014 that number had shrunk to 16,551.
Some at Otafuku suspect the drop may be related to Japan’s population decline. The rapidly graying, lowbirthrate country of 127 million people lost 1million residents between 2010 and 2015, and as older people close their mom-and-pop shops, they tend to be replaced with fewer, larger restaurants, said Akiko Tabuchi of the company’s public relations department.
Though Hiroshima is hardly starved for choices when it comes to okonomiyaki eateries, people continue to open them. Otafuku offers a three-day, $300 class for current and prospective restaurateurs. Shigenori Matsumoto, general manager of the museum at the Wood Egg, says the company encourages proprietors to find ways to make their okonomiyaki unique.
“We tell people to have a distinctive concept — like adding mushrooms if you’re in the mountains, or oysters if you’re near the sea,” says Matsumoto, who has written a book on okonomiyaki and whose business card identifies him as “okonomiyaki meister.”
Otafuku’s original sauce recipe has 50 ingredients, including spices, vegetables and fruits. Dates, imported fromtheMiddleEast, are an unexpected key component, Matsumoto says.
But the company is constantly trying to introduce new products to keep up with modern palates — and keepokonomiyakionplates.
“If kids become devoted to okonomiyaki when they’re young,” Matsumoto says, “we will have a customer for life.”