Okonomiyaki in Shanghai at Takenosuke

Posted on 18. Dec, 2011 @ 10:47 pm by in Food, Shanghai Views: 933

I’m still living in Shanghai – and I’m still enjoying Japanese food whenever I can! Today I checked out an Okonomiyaki place with my wife and her friend… and her friend’s 5-year old who happened to sleep on the floor throughout the entire meal… the slacker.

Okonomiyaki at Takenosuke in Shanghai

The name of the shop is Takenosuke (武之助). They serve Okonomiyaki in Shanghai and play old school Japanese music on the sound system, like Ishikawa Sayuri, Inoue Yousui, Okamoto Mayo, Yumi, and Uemura Kana (hope I got all those names correct). The place prides itself on being a Hiroshima-style okonomiyaki shop, so you can get the Hiroshima-style Okonomiyaki that is filled with noodles, and the place has Hiroshima Carps baseball team photos everywhere.

No Carps stuff in this photo though...

It took forever for our three okonomiyaki orders to come, but we all agreed that it was solid okonomiyaki when they finally showed up. Note, my wife is from Osaka, so her standards for okonomiyaki are pretty high.

If you sit upstairs you will take off your shoes and sit in one of those low tables where the floor is also also depressed so you don’t have to cross your legs. This type of table is called a horigotatsu…shiki (掘りごたつ) table. Hori is to dig. Kotatsu is one of those indoor heated tables… These are not heated, of course.

Unlike they would in Japan, this restaurant doesn’t give you extra aonori (青のり seaweed flakes) or katsuobushi (鰹節 dried fish flakes) or sauce at your table, but that wasn’t a big deal for us. Also, you don’t cook the okonomiyaki yourself a hotplate, they’ll completely prepare it and bring it to your table.

One fun thing was that they had some examples of Hiroshima dialect and other random things on the table.

takenosuke031

It also seems that they have a sort of system set up where Chinese speakers can get an automated explanation of the menu items… it had something to do with a scanner device and special tags embedded into the menu. Looked pretty interesting, but we didn’t try it.

If you’re in Shanghai and need Okonomiyaki be sure to check out Takenosuke!

Japanese post Takenosuke
Address
上海市長寧区古羊路537号
古羊路 near 宋园路
guyang lu near songyuan lu

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