After our early evening walk around Asakusa, we finally made it to our dinner location – Ha Chan’s restaurant. There are some areas in Tokyo that are more famous for monjayaki (Tsukishima), but we chose this place because our friend is in a singing club with Ha chan!
Here’s the menu on the wall at Ha Chan’s.
First we started with some appetizers like edamame…
enoki mushrooms…
that were grilled in butter and shoyu (very good!)
Also oysters with Japanese long onion…
Then we ordered some okonomiyaki. Ha chan helped us mix and grill it.
We also had some stir fried vegetables…
Next we had some grilled potatoes with shoyu. I thought this was going to be plain, but it was actually really good!
Then we had some monjayaki. The first one was a negi monjayaki.
After mixing everything in the bowl, you scoop out the big pieces on to the grill. Then you form a circle with the ingredients and pour the liquid into the middle.
This negi monjayaki was really good. I didn’t expect to like monjayaki at all. Back home I had heard about and seen monjayaki. And in all the pictures I had seen, it pretty much looked like…well you can see from these pictures. But like others I found out looks can be very deceiving. I think I now like monjayaki better than okonomiyaki!
At this point I thought we were done with dinner but yet another bowl came out. This one was kimchi monjayaki. Also very delicious!
We were playing around seeing who could scrape and scoop the monjayaki the best. There is a whole technique to it that they taught us. You have a little spatula and scrape under the edge of it. Then you come over from the top side and push down while pulling a piece away.
To finish off the evening we ordered one last thing, dessert!
This dessert was like a thin pancake with ogura an (sweet beans)
This was a really fun dinner. For those of you hesitant like I was because of the looks of monjayaki, consider giving it a try at least once. I’m so glad I did!
