I have – with good reason – a great distrust of any restaurant that displays plastic food outside. As bad first impressions go, it’s right up there with insulting your mother-in-law. It was lucky for Japanese Pancake World, then, that I hadn’t seen the fake pancake outside the restaurant before suggesting we meet for dinner there. Because sometimes, just sometimes, looks can be deceiving…
In a second lucky strike, we ended up sitting at a sort of breakfast bar overlooking the kitchen, rather than in the main part of the venue. This gave us a great view of proceedings, as well as the ear of the chef for the hour or so we were sitting there. The menu, he explained, was split into three different types of pancakes, known collectively by the eminently forgettable polysyllabic “okonomiyaki”: Osaka-style, in which cabbage and various veges are mixed into the batter before being fried; Hiroshima-style, in which a thin pancake is layered up with noodles, cabbage and whatever extras you fancy and topped with a fried egg; and negi-yaki-style, which is the only pancake that doesn’t involve cabbage but spring onions instead. I was about to make a joke about Gangnam-style, but then realised it was Korean. So that would just be silly.
