No, this is not a patch of pavement outside a Roppongi bar on a Saturday morning. It is a Japanese dish called monjayaki. I am introducing it as part of my effort to disabuse Westerners of their stereotype of Japan as a culinary utopia where every dish is low calorie and aesthetically perfect. Some of Japan's foods rival those of the UK both health and appearance-wise. Monjayaki is one such dish. It is basically a lot of chopped cabbage and other filler swimming in a slurry of watery batter. It is fried on a griddle, but never quite solidifies. One scrapes it up with tiny metal spatulas and eats it (or caulks windows with it -works either way). Its flavor is hard to describe. Kind of like sludgy, half-cooked, savory pancake batter with chunks. For those of you with no access to a monja restaurant, you could easily recreate it at home with, well, sludgy, half-cooked, savory, chunky pancake batter.
