Okonomi Monja Raku Ten Ya

Not satisfied with Botejyu's okonomiyaki, hubby and I combed through our Yokohama city restaurant and shopping guide book, hoping to comfort ourselves for the lack of a local Yacchin's. From the book, we found several okonomi and monja houses with the majority located in or around Yokohama Station, and Raku Ten Ya (楽天家) seems easiest of them all to find being right outside the West entrance. Our novice selves know we should start slow, and for a Saturday night date we decided to play a fun game called "Where's Dinner?"

If you've ever been to Yokohama Station, you'll know that dinner is everywhere and nowhere at the same time. The gigantic station is also an endless web of distraction and an easy location here doesn't always equal an easy time searching. Imagine a very large train station with various tall buildings scatter in all four of its corners, many of them house shopping malls and myriads of restaurants on several of their floors. Now imagine all the same tall buildings become interconnected beneath the entire area in a series of basement levels (yes, under the streets and train tracks but above the subway tracks, which are 4-5 levels down), and each of those basement level houses even more shopping malls and myriads of restaurants.

If you're not picky about where you're having dinner, all sorts of food are beckoning at every turn, 360 degrees. You can literally close your eyes, walk randomly and will arrive at dinner. However, if you are looking for a specific place to have dinner, good luck finding it. That is, if you still have your resolve, lost in the sea of potential dinner candidates. See why "Where's Dinner?" is such a fun game to us? We desperately needed to preoccupy ourselves with some humor in order to make out of that place alive, in the same physique we entered, and not go flat broke having one too many dinners.

And we were handsomely rewarded. The sun had already set, and Raku Ten Ya turned out to be on the 6th floor of some random building outside the West entrance, but it has a big and lit up yellow sign in red font hung vertically along the side of the building. Can't miss that!

Preparing dinner and mixing my okonomi batter

The mixed okonomi batter, this one containing pork and kimchee. Yep, it wouldn't be dinner without kimchee.

Having walked all around the station looking for dinner, we rewarded our effort (and resolve! I can't say we weren't tempted along the way!) by ordering not 1, not 2, but 3 okonomi's! The top middle has pork and kimchee, the lower right has a mix of squid, shrimp, and pork, and the lower left has mentaiko, my other favorite ingredient for, oh, everything.

Just in case you're wondering how much food is 3 okonomi's, one measures about 8 inches across and 1 inch thick after cooking, filled with batter (eggs, all purpose flour, and grated nagaimo), cabbage, panko, and meat or seafood ingredients. It's like taking a medium pizza and fold it into a personal size with all the same amount of cheese and toppings on it. So yeah, 3 medium pizzas for 2 people is a lot of food.

Cooking, cooking!!!

Hubby's plate.

My plate, with lots of sauce and mayonnaise (before you go yuck, Japanese mayonnaise tastes nothing like the American sour variety).

Did we finish all our food? Nope. We stuffed ourselves with 2, and took half of the mix and half of the mentaiko one home.