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The story
On a 5ch livestream discussion board, a post claiming “Rice with ramen, sure — but rice with okonomiyaki? No way” sparked a wider debate about pairing rice with flour-based dishes. Commenters pointed out regional differences: Kansai-style okonomiyaki uses more cabbage and comes out fluffy, while Kanto-style has a higher flour ratio and tends to be denser. Even some Osaka natives admitted that pairing takoyaki with rice feels off to them. The discussion expanded to other regional food customs — sweet red bean paste over rice, deep-fried potato skewers, and rice with yudofu (boiled tofu) — with opinions on what “goes together” splitting sharply depending on where people grew up.
What people said
It's Northern Kanto that has the weird food habits.
Anko on rice… you mean ohagi (rice cakes covered in sweet bean paste)?
Don't they eat that in Kanto?
Right?
When did that even start spreading?
so it usually comes out flat and dense —
more like eating solidified batter.
Kansai-style, on the other hand, is mostly cabbage with flour just acting as a binder, so it's thick and fluffy.
Whether it goes with rice or not probably has something to do with that difference.
So basically Kansai people are eating rice with sauce poured over grilled salad? lol
Sounds like someone's never heard of stir-fried vegetables…
If you're from Osaka, you're eating it with sauce, lol
There's no way I'd order okonomiyaki or takoyaki with rice when eating out, lol
Okonomiyaki restaurants actually have set meals with rice, you know.
Even yakisoba specialty shops in Tokyo have set meals, so don't overthink it.
Eating a plate of sweet red bean paste as a side dish with rice
Boiling azuki beans and pouring them over rice
For some reason it's a Northern Kanto-only thing
Even people in urban Saitama are creeped out by it
I'm from Northern Kanto and I've never even heard of that
You can't lump "okonomiyaki with rice," which is fairly common out west, together with some obscure local-trivia-TV-show thing from one tiny area
That's just stir-fried salad (vegetables), isn't it
If that's the case, people in Kanto eat that too.
What are you even talking about?
You're relying way too much on the sauce.
In Tokyo they dissolve croquettes in soba broth and drink it.
That's seriously so poor it's off-putting.
Kyoto-style yudofu costs several thousand yen even for lunch, so they probably just copied the presentation without the price tag.
Wait, are you serious that people out west don't eat rice with yudofu?
Yudofu in Kanto often has meat added to it, so a lot of the time it's basically just a hot pot.
That's also thanks to the power of mayo though…
I'm not a fan of it either
it's better eaten on its own.
Mixed fry platters are totally a normal thing.
Have you never been to a Western-style diner?
Isn't a mixed fry platter usually like three kinds of seafood and meat? Potato's sometimes thrown in as a side at best.
Don't tell me there's a region where potato actually counts as part of the mixed fry?
I don't know anything that fancy.
It's just three boiled potatoes on a skewer
the kind of thing you buy at a butcher shop and eat.
So that means Kanto-style salad has flour in it, right?
You're missing the point
The issue being raised is whether or not you're eating flour-based food as a side dish with plain (white) rice — not whether or not the dish itself contains flour
The point is that you're treating okonomiyaki as a salad, so
does the salad you know normally have flour in it? That's what's being asked.
Pour curry over that and it's perfect.
Your parents are probably from different regions.
Food differs between rural areas and cities too.
True, my parents are from Osaka, but I asked an AI and it said there's no such custom, so it's probably not really common.
Sweet red bean paste, manju (sweet buns), mitarashi dango (skewered rice dumplings in sweet glaze) — those all count as side dishes too
It's a holdover from a poorer era when people ate whatever they could get
I genuinely thought that was normal
Then I went to college in Tokyo and everyone was creeped out
Background and Key Points of the Debate
Pairing flour-based dishes like okonomiyaki and takoyaki with rice is a perennial topic that highlights food culture differences between Kansai and the rest of Japan, and this thread is very much part of that tradition. In Kansai, households often served rice alongside okonomiyaki out of a practical concern that the dish alone wouldn’t be nutritionally balanced, whereas in other regions there’s a stronger sense that it should be eaten on its own — with even Osaka natives saying that pairing takoyaki with rice is “something tourists tend to do,” revealing a gap between how locals see the custom and how outsiders perceive it. The thread also saw pushback when one poster described eating sweet red bean paste as a side dish with rice as a “Northern Kanto-only” custom, only for another poster who was also from Northern Kanto to say they’d never heard of it — a reminder that so-called “regional trivia” often reflects differences between individual households or generations rather than a truly universal local habit.
*This article is excerpted and summarized from the 5ch (Live News Flash board) thread “Rice with ramen — sure. Rice with okonomiyaki — no way.”
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