Konamontaro Okonomiyaki Osaka Umeda Branch — Restaurant in Osaka

I have a very mixed feelings about this place.

Pros: 1) First what you see is quite a good place in a good location of Umeda, near Donki and multiple cafes and izakayas. 2) You enter place and the Service is polite and trained, though limited staff knows english communicatively. 3) We got in without reservation and got invited, what is a very nice gesture when expecting multiple guests (shortly the restaurant was full). 4) The food you get is nothing of extraordinary, but it is okay and you won't eat badly here. Portions are okay. We ate recommended by others on Google: pork yakisoba and pork okonomiyaki with cheese. 5) We also got free complimentary hot tea, which is as unexpected as very positive.

So, straight to the cons. 1) Main way of ordering is a LINE SNS / Instand Messenger / Social Media app, which for my Samsung / Android device doesn't work and for my Wife's iPhone worked unreliably. Fortunately, Service can take the order in classic way, but this caused some discomfort in first minutes of fighting with the app. 2) Like mentioned earlier, the food looked good and tasted okay, but - just okay. Though it wasn't even close to Okonomiyaki we ate in Hiroshima, so comparison would require to say "disappointing". Worth pointing out was the fact, the amount of meat in both meals was minimal. If "pork" is in the name of the meal, I would expect to be able to recognize it in the meal. 3) There are standard sauces for Okonomiyaki at the table, like the mayonaise one. But they are kept in warm and near the heated part of the tables so we (with sensitive stomachs and IBS) finding them almost completely solid just passed using them. Yeah, I couldn't even push one of them out of the bottle... 4) The restaurant is open to smokers. For some it might be okay, especially regarding they sell alcohol, but there is no "non-smoking" zone designated, nor "smoking-only" zone. You can imagine, the smoke from another table was quite annoying. Only one comment in the google reviews mentiones smoking, and there is almost no information in the restaurant visible to foreign customers. The Service does not tell during entry, this is a fully smoking place. But it's our fault I guess we missed it or didn't ask. 5) If smoking doesn't give you cancer, the heating tables will. I never saw something like this ever in Japan, even in the street food izakayas. I know, this is Asia, the rules are a bit different than we expect in Europe, but this is something else even for the region... The gas-heated tables were all black from burnes. You can see it in my photo - this is not something we could have done during our dining, though we forgot to take a photo before we ate. Amount of coal burned on top of it would make Gordon Ramsay explode, or Magda Gessler throw dishes in the air. It's like a year or more of burn collection. Add the cigarettes residue from smokers and you can imagine chemistry of it. Like someone briefly scrubs it once a day and that's it. No wet towel, no detergent, no polishing, no nothing. We ate anyways, "travel experience" as justification, but somehow random Okonomiyaki restaurant in Hiroshima had all the tables and heaters perfectly cleaned even though they had a 45 minutes waiting queue. So it ain't impossible.

Summing up: the food was good. The Service was good. I would normally give 3 stars for that (Japanese standard) or 4 stars (European standard); would raise by 1 star for free complimentary hot tea (not only standard ice water) and politeness of the staff, BUT the atmosphere was smoky and smelly, the table heaters were very dirty and sauces unreliable (warm and solid-like). And this would mean 1 star to me (both in Japanese and European standard) but with above "pros" I can give it 2 stars. Probably this is not a place for me or people like me and there are some that will be happy with this place, but I honestly cannot recommend it. Sorry for the Service, they were...

The staff are lovely.the food is yummy. But the lack of hygiene was worrying. Just as I started eating, I felt something on my leg. I looked down and saw a cockroach trying to climb up the inside of the trouser leg. I managed to snap a photo of it.

You never really look under the table. But because I did, you can see that its very dirty in there. It seems that they dont clean under the tables. Hence the cockroaches.

It make you wonder where they have been crawling overnight. They serve the food on the hotplate on the table. Its probably where the cockroaches have their evening parties.

A real shame, as everything...

We didn't have the reservation and understand minimum Japanese but the staff was very helpful and friendly. Good variety of food and easy to order via QR code with different language options. Most of the hot food is fully cooked and the tenppen was to keep the food warm only so you can enjoy the food immediately without waiting for self cooking.

A bit salty for kids with all the sauces otherwise it's delicious at a reasonable price. Very special memory to have dinner at this place during our...