Japan Food: Chitose Okonomiyaki Restaurant

In a former post I mentioned how I’ll be forever thankful for Korean John for taking Alex and myself to what has become my favourite restaurant in the world – Chitose Okonomiyaki.

Chitose Okonomiyaki

tastes way better than it looks ;)

 

Chitose Okonomiyaki is a smallish restaurant located in the back alleys of Shinimamiya, Osaka. It’s solely run by a great man called Hideki. His restaurant has been family owned for generations and was handed down to him by his parents when they retired.

Ok so for the uninitiated, what is Okonomiyaki? It’s often referred to as a Japanese savoury pancake (or pizza), personally I think it’s a little more accurate to call it a Japanese version of an omelette. It’s basically shredded cabbage mixed with egg, flour, green onions, your choice of beef/bacon/shrimp/squid, topped with okonomiyaki sauce and seaweed & benito flakes. It’s cooked (and served) on a hot plate in front of you. Sometimes noodles are included in the mix as well. Also Hideki does a version with cheese that is pretty awesome as well, but very filling.

Okonomiyaki in progress

Hideki’s okonomiyaki is by far the best I’ve tasted. After my first visit with Alex in 2011 it was only a matter of 1 or 2 days before we were back again and by the end of the trip we had eaten there 4 times. Each time Amanda and I return to Japan we tend to eat there at least twice a week. Hideki cooks some amazing side dishes that you must try, my picks are: Squid with butter, pan fried oysters and shrimp cooked in egg. Amanda and I have worked out that if we order one mixed okonomiyaki (shrimp, squid & bacon) and one or maybe two side dishes we get a huge feed.

As for prices, a mixed okonomiyaki is 750 yen, side dishes are about 350 yen. A large bottle of beer is 500. This is a super cheap meal, you’ll be hard pressed to find such a great feed for so little yen anywhere else in Japan. 

Prawns (shrimp with eggs)

Shrimp with egg

Fried Oysters

Hideki

Squid with butter

Hideki himself is a great guy. His English is very good (he does have English menus), he is very funny and very generous. He has often given us a free beer, umeshu (plum wine) or side dish and typically tends to round down our bill. This often ends with us trying to force extra cash on him. He was so generous with Alex and I that on our last day in Japan we stuck our head inside his door, threw a 2000 yen note at him then turned and ran. Running away probably wasn’t a great idea as when I rounded the next corner I almost knocked a cop off his bicycle. I still wonder what the cop thought of two white boys sprinting away from a small restaurant in a non-tourist area in Osaka. 

The restaurant itself is a little small by western standards, it has two small ‘hot-plate’ tables that can fit 4-5 people and a counter that seats another 4. Sometimes we’ve gone to eat there to find the restaurant completely full with locals, this is no problems as most people are in and out fairly quickly. 

Fun times at Chitose

We’ve had some great nights at Chitose, the most recent when Amanda and I crashed a birthday party on our last trip. We stepped inside to take the two spare seats at the counter to be greated with a massive round of applause and cheers. I’m still puzzled as to whether Hideki had mentioned us the party or whether they were just drunk enough that two whiteys entering the restaurant was the best thing to happen all night. In true Japanese fashion we quickly made friends with the group and were topping up each other’s beers. Unfortunately the birthday boy got so drunk he lost the use of his legs, this was quite funny at the time until we found out later he was sick enough the next day they put him in hospital. (Yes he’s fine now). If you want to really see Japan and not eat with a bunch of fellow tourists here is a great place to do it. 

And just in case you’ve tried okonomiyaki elsewhere in the world (like Australia) you absolutely have to try it again here. Since first eating at Chitose I’ve tried to find comparable okonomiyaki in and out of Japan and have failed miserably. Some are hardly even recognisable as okonomiyaki, case and point Mizu Restaurant in New Farm, Brisbane – it was more like a McDonald’s hash brown.

To sum up, great food, great chef, great customers, great fun… if you aren’t staying in the area, make the effort to eat here. Combine it with an afternoon/evening walking around Shinsekai and Dobutsuenmae areas. And please say Konnichiwa to Hideki for me!

Here is the Chitose website complete with a Engrish menu and a map. The easiest way to find Chitose is to find the start of the Dobutsuenmae shopping street, then take the 3rd alley on the right. 

NB. Chitose is closed on Wednesdays.

Japan: random sleepers

During my trips to Japan I have marvelled at the locals ability to sleep pretty much anywhere. While having a kip on a train is par for the course these days, there are a few others locations that did make me crack up, here are a few I managed to capture:

asleep on the train

asleep on the train

asleep on the train, must have been an interesting text message

asleep at the baseball (and it was a good game!)

asleep at the baseball

awake at the baseball!!!

asleep in the audio/visual section of a large department store

asleep on the floor at the back of a punk festival

 

asleep on the floor of the train

asleep on the floor of the train... no one cares

Japan: Fun times (and too many drinks) with Korean John

Early on during my first trip to Japan in May 2011, my mate Alex and I met a middle aged Korean man called John. Korean John as we called him was also staying at Hotel Raizan South and was friends with the manager (the excellent) Shinozaki. We quickly learnt that Korean John was a top bloke, very friendly, generous and helpful but also rather bumbling and rather frustrating to travel with. Thanks to John we were introduced to a number of great restaurants and shrines around Japan. We had plenty of hilarious times with Korean John and I thought a few were worth recounting (before the memories are lost forever amongst the rest of the useless information I keep in my brain).

Navigating and travelling with Korean John:

Korean John

John spoke a decent basic level of Japanese and combine that with his electronic translator, he was way better placed than Al or I for any conversations in Nihongo. John had also already been in Osaka for a number of months by the (in addition to any previous visits) so he decided to take us under his wing and kindly wanted to show us around. Our first trip with Korean John was to a Shinto shrine called Sumiyoshi Taisha (I highly recommend a visit here). After what seemed like hours of John rummaging around in his manbag, cross referencing maps, train timetables and various other items he finally devised a plan on how to get there. His research seemed justified as Osaka is a very big city with many companies offering many transport intersecting transport options. We headed for the Shinimamiya Nankai station and after some fumbling around John worked out which of the (only) two platforms we needed and we followed him on a train. After a 10 minute journey we jumped off to find John rather flustered and wandering around in circles, cross referencing his maps, timetables and station signs. He was rather embarresed to say that we had boarded a semi express train and had gone well past the station we wanted to get off at. We corrected our mistake and had a great day wandering around the shrine. I’ve visited this shrine multiples times since and it’s a very simple and short trip from Shinimamiya.

Another day we headed to Kyoto to check out some shrines and temples. We probably should have known better but we put our faith in Korean John’s navigation skills again. After sitting on a local bus for a period of time I began to get a little suspicious we were headed the wrong way. I checked and confirmed my suspicions from my own map then had to spend the next five minutes attempting to convince John. We eventually got off. I had already worked out that all we had to do was cross the street and get the number 206 bus back the way we had come from. But John wasted another 5 minutes trying to translate a conversation with some kind older Japanese ladies about where we needed to go. Even with our poor Japanese skills Al and I could understand that they were pointing across the road and saying 206. I think it was after this incident that Al and I decided to take the lead when going out with John. Initially John was very reluctant to follow us as we were new in Japan and didn’t spent hardly any time at all planning our trips. Eventually he became very impressed how easily we could navigate our way around Japan.

 

Korean John the Spy..?

Al and I were both jealous that Korean John could spend so long on holiday in Japan (often spending his time playing an online Asian card game on Raizan’s computers in the lounge) so we asked him (numerous times) what he did for work. For a while he was able to avoid the question and put us off but eventually we got some answer out of him. However we were given three completely different answers. At some point he managed real estate, another time he owned a bunch of restaurants and the last he sold medical supplies. Al and I joked that it was all a cover and was really a North Korean spy. The more we thought about this the more plausible the idea became.

The manbag and the frequent explosion of gear

the manbag, moments before it all hit the ground

Korean John would always carry what I can best describe as a large men’s leather purse or manbag. He’d keep all his crap in there, electronic translator, maps, timetables and various other equipment (that only a North Korean spy would need). On every single trip we took with John he would invariably drop all his crap on the ground at least twice! This would be at the most inappropriate time or worst possible location too. I recall him dropping his shit on trains, buses, various platforms, in shrines and randomly in the street. You couldn’t help but laugh. We became so accustomed to the noise of John’s stuff exploding on all over the ground that we didn’t even have to look to see what had happened. Strangely enough later in our trip we met a younger Korean bloke who also had a habit of dropping his shit regularly as well. Must be something in the water.

 

Drinking with Korean John

One night Korean John wanted to take us out to a bar with Nomihodai (all you can drink for a few hours for a set fee). It was a much nicer place than I had expected. Al, John & I were given a private booth with a sliding Japanese paper door. We were given a menu and quickly picked out a few cocktails to start with. Moments later the girl returned with our first drinks, we tried to immediately order another 3 drinks but were told we had to finish the first before ordering again. Al and I were determined to make the most of our money over the 2 hour period so we quickly downed our drinks and hit the buzzer to call the waitress back. The paper door was tentatively slid open and the girl asked if something was wrong. She was shocked that we were already ordering more drinks. As you can imagine this process continued for the next hour plus. Al and I were working our way around the drinks menu while Korean John was trying valiantly to keep up with preferred drink of sake. At some point we found out that the last order was 30 minutes prior to the end of our 2 hour block. We decided that one drink over the last half hour wouldn’t cut it so we started stockpiling drinks by hiding full glasses under our table and while constantly ordering more. At one point I had 5 small but full bottles of sake lined up for Korean John. Al and I were getting kind of drunk but John had gotten to a point where he’d invented his own language and seemed to struggle with the concept of gravity. Numerous drunken photos were taken of the evening, my favourite being when I tried to take a photo of Alex and John who were both on the other side of the table to me. John decided he didn’t want to be in the photo and tried to slide sideways on his seat to get out of it. Unfortunately the seat didn’t continue all the way to the door so what he ended up doing was sliding most of the way off the seat, falling into the door and wedging himself on a 45 degree between the door and his seat. Al had to help him back up. Eventually our time ran out, I was feeling pretty exhausted after a very busy day and John was completely smashed from trying to keep up with Al and I. Somehow despite being so drunk John managed to slip out and pay the bill without us evening knowing, yet another generous act. I don’t think the bar had seen two Aussie’s coming, they would have made a big loss that evening no doubt. The bar was around a 10 minute walk from Hotel Raizan South, it was a very slow walk home with John drunkenly pinball’ing his way down the street. Numerous times we had to rescue him from stumbling out onto the road or from heading into a bush. All the while he seemed far more preoccupied with how tired I looked and how he needed to get me home so I could sleep. The next day John was up kind of early and wasn’t looking nor feeling very good. He went back to bed for a while and when he awoke seemed to have no recollection of most of the night nor feeling so bad earlier that morning. 

I don’t recall whether it was that same night or another night with Korean John but as normal it ended with us chatting and drinking with fellow travellers in the Hotel Raizan South lounge. At some point around towards 1am I decided I’d had enough to drink and I’d hit the sack as we had plans to get moving early the next day. At 3:30am I was awoken by a commotion in the halfway of the 9^th floor. All I could hear was one guy yelling “WOOOOOOOOOOOOWWWWWWWWWWW” followed by what could be no one other than my mate Alex yelling something like “SHUT UP DICKHEAD!”. This script was repeated 3 or 4 times before there was a slamming of a door down the hall quickly followed by Al exploding into our room. I learned the next morning that Al got Korean John so drunk that John lost the use of his legs, so Al picked him up, threw him over his shoulder and carried him into the lift, then brought him up to his room. I understand John’s constant wow’ing was in surprise as to how strong Al was to be able to pick him up. Oh and of course we didn’t get far the next morning either J

...and that was the last we heard of Korean John

Korean John finally returned home some 4 odd months after Alex & I visited Japan. I understand by the end he had stayed somewhere over 6 months in total. When Amanda and I returned to Japan a year later in May 2012 I asked Shinozaki about him. Through a broken English/Japanese conversation I found out that John went back and found himself in some sort of trouble. I’m unsure exactly what this refers to but it didn’t sound good. In our trip this year in March 2014 I asked again about John and sadly Shinozaki had heard no more from him. Wherever he is and whatever his is up to I hope he is well. I will not easily forget the hilarious moments we had with him.