Okonomiyaki -Okonomiyaki Katsu お好み焼き克-

The first restaurant featured in this blog is Okonomiyaki Katsu.
For a while, I worked as a clerk at Ritsumeikan University, and this is a restaurant I often frequented. It’s a very small restaurant with two tables sitting on tatami mats and four seats at the counter. The owner’s wife explains the menu and how to eat in English, so the restaurant is packed with foreign tourists at lunchtime.
The most popular dishes are okonomiyaki and yakisoba, cooked on teppan. Okonomiyaki is a kind of pancake made from wheat dough dissolved in water and cooked on a teppan with the ingredients of your choice (okonomi in Japanese). Yakisoba are Chinese noodles sautéed with meat and vegetables. While most yakisoba are prepared with Worcestershire sauce, you’ll also find salted yakisoba here, which have a refreshing flavour.
However, my first choice is soba-meshi.
Soba-meshi is a class B gourmet dish (B kyû gurumé, B級グルメ, in Japanese) from Kobe; B kyû gurumé is a general term for cheap and popular foods. It involves stir-frying yakisoba noodles with rice on a griddle. At Okonomiyaki Katsu, you can also choose Udon-meshi, which uses thick udon noodles instead of soba, and is equally delicious. Sobameshi is a high-calorie dish that adds rice noodles to the carbohydrates in rice. Although it is not healthy, the taste is addictive.
The restaurant is located in a residential area, halfway between Ryoanji temple and Ryoanji mae station, on the Kitano line of the Keifuku Electric Railway. Reservations are not possible at lunchtime, but can be made in the evening. As the restaurant is located in a residential area, care should be taken not to disturb neighbours when queuing.