Okiway
“I've never had Japanese Okonomiyaki before and I can't believe I've been missing out this whole time.”
“My friends had the spicy hiroshima and takoyaki to share and had only amazing things to say about it.”
“My friend just gulped down the Amberjack tartare and i could not stop with the Wasabi Guacamole and the delicious chips.”
Okiway
Takes Reservations: Yes
Delivery: Yes
Take-out: Yes
Accepts Credit Cards: Yes
Bike Parking: Yes
Good for Kids: Yes
Good for Groups: Yes
Waiter Service: Yes
Price range.
$$ Price range $11-30
4 reviews
Rate and write a review Cancel reply
You must be logged in to post a comment.
Atmosphere/design of the place is cool, but food was terrible! I was looking forward to trying out place because it looked good from the outside, but it was so bad. First of all, the service was terrible. There were two waitresses serving a pretty empty restaurant (there were only three tables filled). They seemed more interested in talking to each other and simply walking around the room looking around at nothing/avoiding eye contact with customers than actually serving anyone or taking orders. It took forever for someone to take our order.
We ordered:
-shijemi mushrooms in foil (horrible: tasted like salted water/ugly presentation)
-grilled king mushroom (also horrible: tasted like mushroomy salted water, unappealing texture)
-kale caesar salad (this was actually pretty good, but it's hard to mess up a salad)
-spicy hiroshima okonomiyaki
(the flavor was okay, but it is WAY too expensive for basically ramen with sauce. The noodles were not crispy and there was no pork belly! We paid $15.50 for ramen noodles.)
I rarely complain about food to restaurants, but we had to speak up about this. We told the waitress that we didn't find any pork belly in the ramen. She seemed pretty apathetic about it, but went and told the manager. The manager came over and explained that the pork belly "evaporates" when they cook it. He asked us if we wanted something else, but we just wanted to leave at that point. The waitress then brought us each a little glass of sake, on the house. That was nice, but it didn't make up for the horrible food and inattentive service. It was also overpriced. I won't be coming back.
I thought Okiway was a band.
When signs started appearing on the subway, sidewalks and walls around the Montrose Avenue L in the spring, I assumed this was a hipster indie trio that had taken the Japanese pancake and used it as a moniker.
Later I discovered this was the name of the worst new restaurant in Bushwick.
To be honest, the food at Okiway is probably worthy of two stars, but I'm going to go ahead and subtract a star for this obnoxious advertising campaign. I'll justify it because the arrogance of covering the public services of a transportation system – in violation of the rules – pairs well with the restaurant's bastardization of classic cooking technique.
I'm all for reinvention. I don't need an okonomiyaki or any other food to be slavishly prepared the way it is in Osaka. I do, however, expect it to be good.
The restaurant makes takoyaki in the front of the house, which is relatively common. This transparency means I got to see a bored looking woman halfheartedly spread the batter around. There's none of the precision and timing you see at other places around town. The results is a nearly inedible ball of dough with microscopic pieces of octopus.
Elsewhere our gyoza arrived raw the first time and simply undercooked after sending it back to the kitchen. Salmon tartare is better at nearly every other of the half-dozen places around town where I've sampled it and the skewers, despite being advertised at the "best you will ever taste," are mediocre.
The lone bright spot is the okonomiyaki itself. We ordered it Hiroshima style. It's great to have this dish on the menu at a place in Brooklyn, as usually it appears in the City just as a special. Things would be pretty bad if the restaurant couldn't nail its eponymous dish.
I doubt I'll return for this dish, as the service is a combination of pretentiousness and cluelessness that pretty damn hard to find outside of North Brooklyn. There are long yet woefully inaccurate descriptions of dishes. Follow up questions aren't answered. There is much bragging about the Japanese beer list, yet most of is gone or quite common. We're left with a waiter telling us to have a Sapporo simply because it's "Japanese."
Sorry no. This isn't good enough. This isn't good enough after the amount of money spent on public relations coverage. This isn't good enough after the "viral" advertising campaign. This isn't good enough after being randomly closed the first time I tried to visit during business hours. This isn't good enough coming after the pleas on social media to give the restaurant a second choice after a rocky opening.
This isn't good enough for the neighborhood – and I won't be back.
I guess it's not that surprising that there would be an entire restaurant devoted to okonomiyaki within NYC. And I guess it's even less surprising that it would be within Bushwick, a neighborhood that is chock full of establishments that cater towards very specific items.
I came here for dinner once a few months ago with a friend. They had a few different varieties of okonomiyaki to choose from as well as some special gyozas for offer. My friend and I split an order of their special gyoza of the day (I believe it had avocado in it) and then we split an order of their kimchi okonomiyaki. The gyoza were fine but the okonomiyaki was pretty bland and doughy.
I like that places like this can be found within NYC but this was just kind of meh for me. I'd still be willing to give it another shot as the gyoza was actually pretty good.
Okiway's arrival has been hyped up for over a year, and naturally, they were definitely slammed once their doors finally opened. Luckily they seemed to have worked out most of their kinks, so take everything you see on this page with a grain of salt.
I'm no stranger to okonomiyaki after living in Japan, and I was super excited that an okonomiyaki restaurant was coming to Brooklyn (and in my hood, no less!). Their menu has a bunch of different traditional izakaya foods, but we stayed primarily to their namesake and tried:
Takoyaki- pretty damn authentic. Only complaint was that some pieces didn't have any octopus at all in them, and were essentially a ball of dough.
Classic Osaka Okonomiyaki- very heavy handed on the cabbage and light on the otafuku sauce. Overall very tasty, but needed a bit more sauce.
Classic Hiroshima Okonomiyaki- this one was fantastic. The noodles were crispy, the okonomiyaki was doused in otafuku sauce, and there were huge pieces of pork belly throughout.
Okiway serves their okonomiyaki with two types of Japanese mayo on the side: miso and wasabi. The miso was good but I'm not a huge mayo fan in the first place, so I wish they offered more otafuku sauce on the side instead.
Service was really friendly and the owner (I think?) even came over to check on us. However, our food took a really long time to come out; Okiway was almost empty when we came around 10:00pm on a Saturday night, but it still took around 30-40 minutes to get our food.
Despite the long wait times, Okiway is definitely promising. Can't wait to see what else is to come!