Mizuno

The house dish is the yamaimo-yaki, made with grated mountain yam worked into the batter in place of a good deal of the flour. The result is looser, wetter and considerably lighter than a standard okonomiyaki, with a texture closer to a savoury soufflé than a pancake. It is the reason to come here rather than to any of the forty other okonomiyaki shops within a kilometre, and ordering the plain pork version instead is a waste of the trip.

It is cooked on the counter griddle in front of you and it is not cooked by you. Osaka okonomiyaki is a chef’s dish more often than a DIY one, and at Mizuno the staff do all of it: mix, pour, flip, sauce, bonito. You wait, which is a large part of why the queue moves slowly – each one takes fifteen to twenty minutes on the iron.

A head costs roughly ¥1,200 to ¥2,500 depending on whether you add a second savoury or a beer. That is the going rate for a Bib Gourmand meal anywhere in Japan and here it buys a full lunch.

Worth being clear about, because the confusion is universal. Osaka-style okonomiyaki is mixed: cabbage, batter, egg and fillings are stirred together in a bowl and poured onto the griddle as a single mass. Hiroshima-style is layered, with a thin crepe, a mound of cabbage and a separate nest of fried noodles built up in sequence.

There are no noodles in a standard Osaka okonomiyaki. If you add them you have ordered modan-yaki, which is a real and good variant but is not the default, and asking for “the one with the noodles” in an Osaka shop marks you out instantly. Mizuno serves modan-yaki; order it deliberately if you want it.

The sauce, the mayonnaise, the aonori seaweed and the bonito flakes go on at the counter. The bonito moving in the heat is not a trick; it is thin enough that convection lifts it.

No reservations, no online ticket, no phone list. You stand outside on Dotonbori and wait, and on a Saturday at one in the afternoon that is comfortably an hour.

The workable slots are 11:00, at opening, when you will be seated within fifteen minutes, and after about 20:30, when the evening rush has cleared and there is still ninety minutes of service left. Avoid 12:00 to 14:00 and 18:00 to 20:00 entirely. The counter seats turn over faster than the tables.

It is on Dotonbori itself, a short walk west of Ebisubashi – one of the very few things on that street worth eating. If the wait is impossible, the honest alternative is to walk north into the back streets of Minami, where the okonomiyaki is a third cheaper and eighty per cent as good.