How do you decide where to eat?

Most tools hand you a ranked list of thirty restaurants, which moves the work rather than doing it. Savor Scout takes your craving and location and returns one restaurant, showing its match score, what it beat, and the evidence behind the pick.

Yes. Searching is free, no app download is required, and you can run one search without creating an account.

How is Savor Scout different from Google Maps or Yelp?

Maps and Yelp are directories that rank everything and leave the deciding to you. Savor Scout makes the call. It reads menus and reviews for the specific dish you asked about rather than ranking places by overall star average, and it shows its reasoning. Its place data comes from the same public sources, so the difference is the selection, not the data.

Savor Scout › Food guides › Okonomiyaki

How to find good okonomiyaki

Okonomiyaki is a savoury Japanese pancake of cabbage, batter and fillings, cooked on a griddle and covered in sauce, mayonnaise and dancing bonito flakes. Osaka and Hiroshima make it very differently.

Find Okonomiyaki near you →

What separates a good one from a bad one

Plenty of cabbage — Finely shredded cabbage should make up most of the pancake, giving it a light, sweet texture.
Cooked on a teppan — A big flat griddle, often in front of you. Crisp outside, fluffy within.
Okonomi sauce and Kewpie mayo — Thick, fruity, savoury sauce and Japanese mayo zig-zagged on top.
Bonito flakes and aonori — Shaved dried fish that moves in the heat, and green seaweed powder.
Hiroshima style, if offered — Layered rather than mixed, with yakisoba noodles inside. A sign of a specialist.

What to order

Pork okonomiyaki — Osaka style.
Hiroshima style with noodles — If available.
Seafood okonomiyaki — Shrimp and squid.
Takoyaki — Octopus balls, often served alongside.
Yakisoba — Fried noodles from the same griddle.

Where to find Okonomiyaki

Okonomiyaki is mostly found at Japanese restaurants, so that is where to look. Open listings put 13,468 of them across the US, and these are the cities and campuses with the most.

Cities with the most

New York, NY 528 Los Angeles, CA 274 San Francisco, CA 192 Honolulu, HI 192 Las Vegas, NV 148 Seattle, WA 122 Chicago, IL 121 San Diego, CA 94

Campuses with the most within a mile

NYU 176 Touro University 163 The Graduate Center 163 Baruch 162 New School University 154 FIT 132

A few to start with

icca — New York, NY
20 Warren St, New York
Azay — Los Angeles, CA
226 1st St, Los Angeles
Zaoh — San Francisco, CA
1555 Mission St, San Francisco
Irifune Restaurant — Honolulu, HI
850 Mililani St, Honolulu
Bocho Sushi — Las Vegas, NV
124 S 6th St Ste 150, Las Vegas
joybento — Seattle, WA
214 Madison St, Seattle

Counts are listings in Overture Maps open data (September 2026), counted by the town in each address. Independent places only in the examples above, and they are a starting point rather than a ranking.

How Savor Scout looks for it

The search reads for okonomiyaki, teppan, Osaka and Hiroshima, which surfaces specialist griddle restaurants and izakayas that make it in-house.

Find Okonomiyaki near you →

Looking in a particular city?

Each of these opens Savor Scout with the location already set, so you can say what you want and it searches from there. It covers 1,000 US cities in total — these are simply the largest.

All 1,000 cities →

Related food guides

Japanese food, Izakaya, noodles

When you might want this

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