Hokkaido Eating

The eating in Hokkaido was fantastic. In fact, Hokkaido is extremely well known (and popular) for sourcing most of Japan with amazing produce, fish and meat. Anything and everything here tastes great.

We were sure to eat ramen on the trip because Hokkaido ramen is world class. We hit up すみれ (Sumire) ramen since we had gone to the smaller version in the Yokohama Ramen museum. Our hotel was in an excellent location near すすきの (susukino) station, so we just walked across the stree. We arrived at 10:45am and basically opened up the ramen place. Our group was second in line. Awesome. The line was incredibly long at 11:10am. So we were proud of being there early!

The broth had this layer of fat on it. Apparently great tasting ramen needs fat floating on top.

Hokkaido is also known for their crab. They have king crab, snow crab, and a type of hairy crab. Sam’s co-worker highly recommended an all-you-can-eat (tabehodai) crab place (B-set for 3700 yen). So we had to go. Sam and Wendy had actually eaten it the day before, but they loved it so much, that they went again with us the next day. We ate 5 plates of king crab amongst 5 people. The snow crab wasn’t terribly great compared to the salty and meatiness of the king crab. To top it all off, they had all-you-can-drink (nomihodai) for 1050 yen, which all of us took advantage. The only downside of this place is that their beer is Kirin and not Sapporo Class (only sold in Hokkaido). I guess they had to make some margin from their nomihodai.

As with all festivals, there’s tons of street food. We had some scallops and grilled conch on the street before lunch. The sea scallops were awesome. They were large and very tender. The conch was a little chewy due to the grilling, so we ended up having it again later in our sashimi.

One of our friends, who lives in Sapporo, recommended that we try her favorite sushi restaurant, はなまる (hanamaru), so we did. The sashimi platter was an awesome deal for the amount of sushi. It was a serving size for 3 and was under 2000 yen. The sushi was great also, but we were getting pretty full since we had the street food earlier. This was the first time that we had crab meat, barely cooked, in our sashimi. There was also one piece of sushi that was crab meat too.

Our sashimi platter was so large, I had to rotate and take photos (4 total).