Okosama lunch — Japan

Okosama lunch is a single children's plate that gathers several familiar dishes together rather than being one recipe on its own: a small dome of rice topped with a paper flag, a hamburger steak patty, breaded fried shrimp, ketchup-tossed spaghetti, a little salad, and a cup of pudding or jelly for dessert, all served on one plate at once. It is reported from Japan, where it appears on the children's section of restaurant menus, particularly at family and department-store restaurants, rather than being cooked at home from a fixed set of instructions. The name itself simply means "children's lunch," and the plate is built to appeal to young diners through variety, colour and small portions of each item rather than through any single dish. Each element is prepared separately using ordinary techniques: the patty is mixed, shaped and pan-fried, the shrimp is breaded and deep-fried, the spaghetti is boiled and tossed in ketchup, and the rice is packed into a small dome and marked with a flag. The pieces are then arranged together on one plate so that a child gets a small taste of several different things rather than one large portion of a single dish. What differs from one okosama lunch to the next is mainly the substitutions restaurants make around the same basic layout: some swap the shrimp for a fried egg or fish stick, others replace the pudding with jelly, ice cream or fruit, and the size of each portion is scaled to a child's appetite. The flag and the dome of rice remain the most constant markers of the plate across versions.