Atsuyaki Tamago Burger

Tamagoyaki, the layered rolled omelette, has been street food in Japan since the Edo period, when the ban on eating chicken and eggs was lifted. One famous shop, Ōgiya in Ōji, opened in 1648 and appears in a print by Hiroshige. The dish became an everyday food in the 1950s, when the government encouraged families to feed children more protein and farmers raised more chickens, and by the 1960s it was said to be one of the three things Japanese children loved most, alongside the Giants baseball team and the sumo wrestler Taihō.

• Japan
• Since 1970
• $

Dom Dom exists because of a quarrel over one percent. The supermarket giant Daiei planned a joint venture with McDonald’s to bring hamburgers to Japan, but McDonald’s wanted a 50–50 split and Daiei’s founder, Isao Nakauchi, insisted on 51 percent and control. The deal collapsed, so Daiei built its own chain. In February 1970 it opened a burger shop outside its store in Machida, Tokyo, more than a year before McDonald’s opened in Ginza, which makes Dom Dom Japan’s first hamburger chain. The name comes from “dondon”, from the Daiei motto of selling good things “ever more cheaply”; DONDON was already trademarked, so it became DOMDOM. The mascot is an elephant called Domzō-kun.

About thirty restaurants, mostly in shopping-centre food courts around Tokyo, Chiba, Osaka and Okayama, plus one in Taipei.

The full Dom Dom Hamburger burger menu and story →