Okonomiyaki Burger
What Dom Dom calls a traditional taste: an okonomiyaki pancake, a fried egg and shredded cabbage in a bun, with okonomiyaki sauce and mayonnaise. There is no beef, and it works like a savoury Japanese street snack that happens to be in bread. Sweet, tangy sauce, soft egg and crunchy cabbage. A strange idea that makes immediate sense once you taste it.
The story
Okonomiyaki means roughly “grilled as you like it”: a batter of flour, egg and cabbage cooked on a griddle with whatever you add, finished with a sweet Worcestershire-based sauce and mayonnaise. Its ancestors were sweet griddle crêpes, and in the Meiji era children bought a drawn-on-the-griddle version from cheap sweet shops, sometimes called dondon-yaki after the drums vendors beat, a coincidence for a chain called Dom Dom. The name okonomiyaki first appears at an Osaka shop in the 1930s, and after the Second World War, when rice was short, it boomed as a cheap, filling meal.
What’s inside
- okonomiyaki pancake
- fried egg
- shredded cabbage
- okonomiyaki sauce
- mayonnaise
- sesame bun
Make it at home
There is no copycat of the Okonomiyaki Burger yet. Until there is, these recipes on the site come closest to it, judged by what goes into the bun.
- Shares beef and egg
Runny Egg Hashbrown Burger - Shares beefRavioli Burger
- Shares beef
McDonald's Bulgogi Burger (Copycat) - Shares beef
Skip Marooch's Chutney Burger
Similar burgers at other chains
Built around the same things as the Okonomiyaki Burger.- Bembos · beef and egg
SignatureHamburguesa A lo Pobre - Gourmet Burger Kitchen · beef and egg
Hot Diggity - Red Robin · beef and egg
SignatureRoyal Red Robin - Grill'd · beef and egg
SignatureMighty Melbourne
More from Dom Dom Hamburger
About Dom Dom Hamburger
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.
Not affiliated with Dom Dom Hamburger. Trademarks belong to their owners.