Japan Is Famous For Food, and This Oft-Overlooked Region Has Some of the Best.

Vendors selling Hokkaido crabs at the Sapporo Snow Festival. Photo: icosha/Shutterstock

“The excellence and freshness of dairy and seafood, especially, [in Hokkaido] is distinguished, even within Japan,” says Keisuke Kobayashi, a born-and-raised Hokkaido chef who owns Yoroshiku, a Japanese restaurant in Seattle serving traditional Hokkaido-style cuisine.

Aside from being the agricultural heartland of Japan, Hokkaido’s geographic isolation from the rest of the country and mix of culinary influences from other cultures has also created a food culture distinct from the rest of Japan. Hokkaido’s cold climate has historically made rice cultivation more difficult, and other ingredients like butter, cheese, and potatoes are more heavily featured in Hokkaido cuisine. It’s also one of the few places in the world to try traditional, rare foods from the Indigenous Ainu people, including bear.

With its cornucopia of fresh ingredients and melting pot of cuisines, Hokkaido is one of the best places to both explore Japan’s culinary variety, and taste its far-north terroir.

Shokupan bread, also called milk bread. Photo: thongyord/Shutterstock

Hokkaido’s flat lands, fertile soil, and distinct four-season climate are ideal for growing crops. Agriculture in Hokkaido may date as far back as the Jōmon period (14,000 to 300 BCE), with early hunter-gatherers growing millet and other hardy crops to supplement hunting, fishing, and gathering. But things started to change in the mid-1800s at the dawn of the Meiji era. Modern agriculture and dairy farming came to the island with the Treaty of Kanagawa, which opened Hokkaido’s Hakodate port to outside traders.

Today, Hokkaido produces more than 50 percent of Japan’s dairy, with pasture-raised cows, reared on high-quality diets of grass and grains to produce creamy, smooth milk for butter, cheese, soft-serve ice cream, and fluffy shokupan milk bread — and produces the majority of Japan’s potatoes, beef, soybeans, and wheat. Hokkaido is also where Japan’s massive (and expensive) Yubari King melons come from; a pair sold for $45,000 in 2019.

A raw sea urchin and salmon roe bowl. Photo: thongyord/Shutterstock

Even though excellent seafood is a constant around Japan, Hokkaido’s offerings are especially prized for their freshness and flavor. Thanks to its location at the crossroads of the Sea of Japan, the Pacific Ocean, and the Sea of Okhotsk, marine flora and fauna like abalone, scallops, shrimp, and kombu kelp are kept satiated by a constant flow of plankton-rich water. Snow, red king, and horsehair crabs thrive in Hokkaido, growing to massive, meaty sizes. Local seafood dishes like kaisen-don rice bowls celebrate the aquatic abundance with colorful arrangements of sea urchins, roe, and marble-y salmon slices, sourced from the salmon runs on Hokkaido’s northeastern Shiretoko Peninsula and the Nemuro Strait.

“Even kaizen-sushi (conveyer belt sushi) [here] is recognized as higher quality than formal sushi restaurants in other parts of Japan,” says Kobayashi.

Jingisukan, or grilled mutton. Photo: Yusei/Shutterstock

Cut off from the main island of Honshu by the Tsugaru Strait, Hokkaido’s remoteness from other parts of the country and mix of culinary influences from the Ainu People, China, Western nations, and immigrants from other parts of Japan all played a role in turning Hokkaido cuisine into the melting pot it is today.

“Hokkaido was able to innovate and develop new and unique dishes such as soup curry due to its diversity of residents, as well as reduced pressure to conform with deep tradition as enforced in other parts of Japan,” explains Kobayashi.

Some popular dishes, like jingisukan (grilled mutton), draw inspiration from the food traditions of northeastern China, while jibie (wild-game dishes) harken back to pre-Meiji era methods of food production. Ainu people have traditionally practiced hunting methods passed down over centuries, often cooking with wild game like sika deer and brown bears.

To counter its frigid, snowy winters, soups, stews, and brothy dishes like soup curry are all core parts of the Hokkaido diet. But with an estimated 1,200-plus ramen shops — more than anywhere in the country other than Tokyo – Hokkaido especially loves its noodles. Part of that is pride: Hokkaido is supposedly where Japanese ramen was first created, when a restaurant in Hakodate served a dish inspired by Chinese soba noodles, in 1884.

Seafood ramen is a popular food in Hokkaido. Photo: Koenig_K/Shutterstock

But the other part is that it’s the birthplace of miso ramen, one of the most popular ramen styles in the world. It was invented in the mid-1900s by Morito Omiya at his Sapporo ramen shop Aji no Sanpei, when he added miso paste and Hokkaido-born toppings like sweetcorn, pats of butter, and seafood to pork broth. The remote locations of other towns on Hokkaido also bore their own unique ramen styles, with chefs in the mountainous city of Asahikawa adding insulating layers of lard to their shoyu (soy sauce-based) broths for extra warmth in the wintertime, and coastal Hakodate giving a nod to its Chinese trading history and seaside setting with silky, clear shio (salt) broths.

And that’s barely getting to the bottom of the ramen bowl, as other shops and cities have created riffs on ramen, like spicy miso ramen or Muroran curry ramen.

Photo: Edu Snacker/Shutterstock

Hokkaido’s fertile land and clean water have also made it one of Japan’s best drinks destinations. Since cultivation isn’t as common as in other parts of Japan, rice based-sake has taken a backseat to other types of beverages like gin, potato shochu, and even natural wine. But whisky and beer are king.

Not only does Hokkaido produce plenty of top-tier grains for beer and whisky, but two pioneers of the local distilling and brewing industries — Masataka Taketsuru, the father of Japanese whisky, and Seibei Nakagawa, Japan’s first German-trained brewmaster — both found Hokkaido’s climate to be perfect for their crafts.

For Taketsuru, who studied whisky making in Scotland and worked at the legendary Suntory Yamazaki Distillery, Hokkaido reminded him of the Scottish Highlands, leading him to found his own distillery, Nikka Whisky, in 1934. For beermaker Nakagawa, Hokkaido’s colder temperatures were the ideal place to practice German cold-brewing techniques at Sapporo Brewery, which helped launch Japan’s beer industry in 1876.

The Sapporo Museum offers tours and tastings. Photo: Pixel Wanderer/Shutterstock

Beer, in particular, is Hokkaido’s beverage of choice. In addition to being the home of Sapporo (Japan’s oldest beer brand), the island has a thriving craft brewing scene, with microbreweries like Hokkaido Brewing and Moon Sun Brewing making German-style brews, fruity lagers made with locally grown fruit like yuzu, and thirst-quenching ales and IPAs.

Nijo Market in Sapporo. Photo: AKMS studio/Shutterstock

As the island’s capital, Sapporo is a great place to kick off a Hokkaido food tour. You can’t visit without trying a bowl of miso ramen at the place that started it all, Aji no Sanpei, before tasting your way through different variations at Ganso Sapporo Ramen Yokocho, a narrow alley of 17 shops that’s been around since the 1950s. You can wander past colossal crabs at seafood markets like Nijo Market and Curb Market before sampling items like fresh donburi bowls or sashimi at the on-site izakayas. At the Umizora No Haru izakaya, you can taste traditional Ainu dishes like venison, duck, salmon, and bear, and if you’re a beer fan, you’ll want to wash it all down with a flight or pint at the Sapporo Beer Museum.

Asahikawa Ramen Village. Photo: retirementbonus/Shutterstock

Outside of Sapporo, the port city of Otaru is chock-full of breweries, distilleries, and specialty food shops along its quaint canals. If you have an extra hour or two, pop in at the Nikka Whisky Distillery in Yoichi for a tasting or tour. If you’re en route to Asahikawa, pause at the Iwase Dairy Farm for gelato before trying regional ramen variations at Asahikawa Ramen Village. At the Hokkaidian Homestead near Lake Toya, you can learn how to make traditional island dishes from seasonal ingredients, ranging from deserts to main courses.

 

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Kobayashi’s Seattle restaurant Yoroshiku is highly rated and always popular, but Hokkaido cuisine has found its way across the Pacific to many major US cities. Renowned Asahikawa ramen shop Ramen Santouka has locations in the Boston and Seattle areas, and Akahoshi Ramen dishes up lard-y miso ramen in Chicago. At Indigo Cow in Seattle and Los Angeles, you sample Hokkaido’s famous dairy in creamy soft-serve ice cream swirls.