Japanese Pancakes

We don't know about you, but we'd never heard of Japanese Pancakes before, and when our friends invited us to dinner, we figured it was a weird Dutch take on Japanese food (the Dutch do love their pancakes). Instead, it's an actual real thing and even more, it was delicious.  The Japanese word for this kind of pancake is Okonomiyaki, which literally means 'cook as you like.' At the restaurant in town, they serve three different styles: Osaka, Hiroshima, and Negi-yaki. Naturally, we tried all three.

The Osaka style has most of the ingredients mixed in with the batter and then various toppings are added depending on what you order.

The Hirosima style starts with a thin, crepe-like pancake of only batter, and then several layers of ingredients are piled on top, including fried noodles and a fried egg. That's the monster on the left side of the picture:

The Negi-yaki style also starts with a thin pancake, but differs from the others in that it has no cabbage, but plenty of scallions.  The Negi-yaki pancake is also topped with another pancake and compressed as it cooks (also note the toppings added to the Osaka pancake in the foreground):

Most are served with a Japanese mayonnaise or a sweet sauce and they are very filling (but, allegedly, full of enough cabbage to keep the calorie content down, which of course means, sure, have another beer).  The finished product:

They were amazingly good and we can't wait to go back.