Downtown Sapporo Salmon at Daimaru Mall in Sapporo Kani Goten fish market in Shiraoi Sapporo Bier Garten Shellfish tanks at Kaikoubo in Hakodate Coastal Hokkaido Fishing boats in Shiraoi A brown bear, the symbol of Hokkaido, atop Kani Goten fish market and restaurant in Shiraoi '),$('

Miso ramen with pork, bamboo shoots, and other toppings at Menya Saimi in Sapporo

Salmon donbur from Kikuyo Shokudo Honten in Hakodate

Lamb shoulder at Sapporo Bier Garten .

Sea urchin in the shell

Vegetable still life at Tempura Tazawa in Hakodate

Hairy crab at Takinoya ryokan in Noboribetsu.

Octopus rice and boiled vegetables at Gohanya Haruya in Sapporo

Soba noodles at a Hakodata train station

Grilled scamorza at Yakitori Shiro in Sapporo

Marinated sea urchin at Uniya Murakami in Hakodate

Cuttlefish sashimi at Kaikoubo

The spread at Takinoya ryokan

Crab at Kaikoubo

Dinner at Gohanya Haruya in Sapporo

Shrimp and angelica tree-shoot tempura with traditional condiments at Tempura Tazawa in Hakodate

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Chefs at the author\'s favorite donburi spot Kikuyo Shokudo Honten in Hakodate

Haruna Hono at Gohanya Haruya in Sapporo

Chef-owner Eikichi Sakurai of Ebisuken

Tempura Tazawa chef-owner Tazawa Koichi

Taj Mahal food truck in Niseko

A regular eating king crab at Kaikoubo in the asaichi (morning market) in Hakodate

Chef-owner Eikichi Sakurai of Ebisuken in Hakodate plating a dish

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For the past decade, I have sought out sea urchin like a zombified bipedal sea otter. I have eaten giant red urchins— uni , in sushi-speak—alive and wiggling in slow motion from the dock in Santa Barbara, California, and I’ve slurped from split shells in the street markets of Catania, Sicily. I’ve eaten it in $15 panini in Manhattan and off of a trompe l’oeil seashore of frozen rocks and ice in Copenhagen.

Many times I have heard the sotto voce benediction of “Hokkaido” delivered when the sushi chef hands over that trumping-everything-else piece of uni nigiri. Many times I have thought, Someday. Someday I will go there, to the northernmost island of Japan, and eat that most revered of urchins in full view of the waters from which it was plundered.

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Last winter, I got that chance. To seek out that sea urchin. To suss out Hokkaido as a dining destination. To take my wife and three-year-old daughter, Hazel, to a land where we didn’t know the language__1 __, to explore a place for which there was a shortage of reliable English-language information for us to cop our itinerary from. To paddle up tributaries of miso ramen broth and portage over tangles of tempura on my way to the heart of sea urchin country.

LAMB FAT WISHES AND DONBURI DREAMS

Hokkaido is nearly the size of Ireland, with a shape like the profile of a triceratops’s head. Skiing types have tried to tell me that the mountains are majestic (Sapporo, the capital of Hokkaido, did host the 1972 Winter Olympics), but I can never really hear what they’re saying, because when I think of Hokkaido, I think of the sea. It’s fecund in a fairy-tale sort of way, yielding those superlative sea urchins, as well as salmon, scallops, squid, shrimp, sea snails—and those are just the things that start with the letter S.

But Hokkaido is more than just seafood. It produces dominant amounts of Japan’s wheat, meat, corn, and dairy. Its cuisine is not a thing entirely apart from the rest of Japan’s but a subcategory with its own personality, bolstered by the tremendous natural bounty of the landscape.

Because the island is too big to swallow in one trip, I had to trim first and measure my results after. I chose to visit the cities of Sapporo and Hakodate, which means I missed out on Asahikawa (a big place with a great ramen tradition) and Otaru (small, with a terrifically photogenic canal running through it), as well as dozens of more rural destinations.

Despite the generous number of Michelin stars given to white-tablecloth spots, I chose (and would choose again) to eat somewhat closer to the ground, because I found that simpler was better.

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My meal at the three-Michelin-star Sushi Tanabe in Sapporo was lovely, but a shadow of the experiences I have had at equally highly regarded sushiyas in Tokyo. Dinner was a pleasure at the gloriously luxurious Takinoya ryokan —an exquisite inn in the town of Noboribetsu, a destination known for its hot springs—but one that paled in comparison to similarly composed meals I’d eaten in Kyoto__2 __.

In the nights leading up to my trip, I counted uni donburi like sheep as I fell asleep. I intended to spend every morning of my trip scouring fish markets for raw uni donburi —it is customary, I had read, to eat bowls of steaming rice heaped with raw seafood for breakfast.

Scenes from Hokkaido

But the concierge at the JR Tower Hotel in Sapporo did her best to dissuade me from visiting the city’s fish markets. She told me, in a polite way, that they were tourist traps. After a couple of mornings of not following her advice, I relented: The markets felt more like “attractions” than places that are feeding the city. We put all our hope eggs in the Hakodate donburi basket and sought out other delights in Sapporo, ready to be swept off course and explore what else the city had to offer.

As a result, my first memorable meal wasn’t seafood at all but a Hokkaido-specific specialty that goes by the not-at-all-Japanese name of jenghiskhan . It is lamb cooked on a convex cast-iron grill, which apparently resembles the headgear once worn by the Mongols enough to earn the name.

Advice that my wife got through the friend of a friend led us to Jenghiskhanya Miyashita Shouten . The restaurant is hidden in a narrow side alley off of one of the Susukino neighborhood’s covered arcades, right near the giant Ferris wheel that lights up Sapporo’s skyline.

Jenghiskhan is a simple affair: After the grill heats up over charcoal, onions and bean sprouts go on, then you grill your meat, eating it piece by piece with a dipping sauce. (Soy sauce with vinegar, apple, orange, lemon, bonito flakes, mirin, and sake in the case of this particular establishment.) When the meat is gone, the drippings collected in the grill fortify a clear broth with thin wheat noodles— somen —to round out the meal.

Clouds of billowing lamb fat are not everyone’s speed, which is where a grilled-meat meal at Yakitori Shiro comes in handy. The space is elegant, modern, and welcoming. Vintage Hermès ads hang on the walls; the wine list is compelling. All the standards are rendered righteously, from packed skewers of crisp and crinkled brown chicken skin to the hulking meatball called tsukune . Dried corn kernels brewed into tea and grilled Hokkaido-made scamorza cheese root the restaurant in Sapporo, but the hospitality and quality put it in the upper echelon of yakitoriyas anywhere.

In case you want to rewind for a second there, yes, Italian-style scamorza—one of a small but not negligible number of Euro-influenced cheeses—is made in Hokkaido. Dairy farms play a large role in the outward face Hokkaido presents: Hypercute images of cows and silos and barns are deployed in all manner of promotional literature, on bags of hard little white sweets called milk candy, which are to the northernmost island of Japan what Frango mints are to Chicago, sold anywhere tourists might be.

NOODLES, BUTTERED & OTHERWISE

On the topic of dairy: I knew that my trip wouldn’t be all urchin all the time; man cannot live by uni alone. I was eager to detour as often as necessary to get a picture of Hokkaido’s ramen scene, home and origin of the now omnipresent miso ramen.

For reasons I am no longer entirely sure of, I was possessed of the misconception that there would be butter and corn on top of every bowl of miso ramen I ate. And though it is an iconic and available expression of north country ramen, it is not ubiquitous.

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Menya Saimi , the island’s only shop that routinely lands on the national rankings of ramenyas in Ramen Walker magazine__3 __, makes a broth that is more like the archetypical embodiment of the Sapporo—and greater Hokkaido—miso ramen style. There, the ramen cooks employ woks (tools I did not see used at the Tokyo ramen shops I’d visited) to stir-fry miso with aromatics (garlic, sesame, members of the allium family—the mix changes from shop to shop and is closely guarded), caramelizing and aromatizing it. Then the fatty, porky, perfect-for-the-cold-weather broth is added to the wok and forced into emulsified oneness with the miso.

Menya Saimi’s broth had a depth and complexity I didn’t find elsewhere, and the thimble-size garnish of just-grated ginger added sparkle and verve that helped me power through to the bottom of the very filling bowl.

In fact, it took quite a bit of digging around to find places with the butter-corn topping. The best was a four-hour train ride from Sapporo, past picturesque dairy farms, snow-blanketed mountains, and a stretch of ferocious coast, in the port town of Hakodate.

Delicious Dishes

Hakodate is a handsome older city that’s slowly giving way to the modernizing march of progress that turned Tokyo into the world hub that it is and remade downtown Sapporo in the last decade. In other words: There’s still plenty of older-school Japan to be explored and enjoyed there.

Particularly at Ebisuken , a modest and homey ramen shop on a side street off a weathered covered arcade that feels as if it was once the main street of Hakodate.

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After affecting a look of solemn professionalism for a minute, Eikichi Sakurai, the chef, squatted and cracked a handsome smile to welcome Hazel to the restaurant__4 __. As my friend translated the menu, Sakurai called out “classic” in English when she mentioned the miso ramen with corn and butter.

His wok technique was precise and conducted partially out of view, so as not to reveal his recipe. His noodle-draining technique was transfixing, a vigorous vertiginous shake executed with a Chinese spider skimmer. I imagined myself attempting such a move and the next-level noodle mess I’d make. The results were an idealized cartoon rendering of everything you could want out of a bowl of miso-corn-butter ramen: rich and sweet and not overpowering, a melding of flavors Sakurai had been refining for the better part of 50 years.

FROM THE TEMPURA TEMPLE TO THE SEA

The best lead that I got from that Michelin guide was for a one-star place called Tempura Tazawa in Hakodate. One chef, one seating a night, a temple of tempura.

Tazawa and his wife were severe, if polite, as he started us off with three courses of raw seafood. These were sublime, better than any sushi restaurant I visited on the trip: shrimp with fresh sansho leaves; fluke with yuzu and herbs; Arctic char and sweet bean paste wrapped in a cherry leaf in some sort of gooey seaweed broth.

Then he began to conjure the tempura, one course at a time, from a giant, burnished copper cauldron that was the focal point of the horseshoe-shaped counter that ringed it. Twelve courses of fried food could be purgatorial torture in the wrong hands. Instead, Tazawa, who has the surgical precision and supernatural communion with his ingredients most often attributed to sushi chefs, summoned a suite of greaseless, crisp, ideal tempura, each a one- or two-bite portion of perfection.

The tempura parade kicked off with the horned shells of oni ebi , or “devil” shrimp, the flesh of which we’d just eaten raw. His menu, he explained, was looking forward to the thaw of spring, so he and a gardener friend worked together to grow asparagus as well as some typically wild spring crops, including a bitter sprout called taranome . When a young couple asked what conger eel was, a crack in the chef’s stoic façade opened, and he retreated to the kitchen and reemerged with a giant picture book about seafood that was passed around the bar during the course of the night.

And it was finally in Hakodate that I found what had lured me all this way.

At Hakodate asaichi , the morning market, there was a profusion of spots specializing in seafood donburi that opened as soon as (or before) the sun rose. Breakfast donburi in Hakodate are an ace move, like barbecue for breakfast in Texas Hill Country. My sampling of the market’s offerings shows that it was hard to go that far wrong. The best seafood breakfast I ate out of the ten or so I tried was the simple bowls of pristine raw seafood at the narrow and cramped market location of Kikuyo Shokudo Honten , a workingman’s donburi spot.

Restaurants and Restaurateurs

Salmon roe is a Hokkaido specialty, and my companions and I prissily judged the ikura we sampled, scarfing untold quantities of glistening orange eggs, looking for the stuff with just the right oily/sweet saline pop. Kikuyo Shokudo Honten had it, fantastic on its own, and in an oddball dish called salmon oyako bukkake don —a collision, in this instance, of salmon eggs, avocado, raw quail egg, sea urchin, and seaweed. It’s a ravishing combination, a dish I discovered on our last day in town and now will have to fly back around the world to eat again.

Wandering the market, I was surrounded by displays of crab that were profuse and perverse in their abundance. The trophy crustaceans were legion and living, spindly red arachnid monsters with leg spans as wide as a man. There were hairy crabs as hirsute as Brooklyn baristas and as big as dinner plates, with flesh sweet and firm.

And it was in the asaichi , not a fancy sushi bar, that I found my apex of uni eating. It was at an unassuming spot called Uniya Murakami , the restaurant arm of a nearby uni -packing operation.

Here’s the thing about perfect sea urchin: Words fail it. It’s a full-body experience, like a wave crashing over your head. It’s sweet, with a texture like a cloud made out of sex. When it’s perfect, the eating is, quite literally, ethereal. At Uniya Murakami, there were fresh urchin and salted urchin, soy sauce–cured urchin, and urchin treated in simple but beguiling ways I have never seen before and may never again. There was a dashimaki tamago , the traditional, sweetish dashi-and-egg rolled omelet, constructed with layers of raw-ish sea urchin.

And though the urchin preparations were novel, the pleasure was familiar. In those moments of total satiation, I was able to quiet down the constantly questing part of my brain, which had been hungering for this experience for years, and drink in the scene.

I was with my family and friends around a table, eating good food. I was reminded that the reward of togetherness around the table is always greater than the momentary satisfaction of the foods that enable it.

Whenever a meal triggers that feeling, no matter where in the world it happens—over burgers at a cookout, or a terrace on a hillside in Tuscany, or the back corner of a fish market in Hakodate—I find it unlocks the spirit to adventure further and seek out more good times with more new friends around tables yet unseen.









1 We traveled with friends who acted as our translators. While it is mathematically possible that one could negotiate Hokkaido without knowledge of the Japanese language, it is highly probably that it would be a complete and total drag, like watching a movie through a gauze blindfold. Back to the Story ↑

2 That said, sitting in a scorching bat of volcanically heated water loaded with stinky but supposedly healing minerals while staring out on a mountainside of snow-covered trees as red foxes dart in and out of view is a very, very restorative way to spend a day. Back to the Story ↑

3 There is a family of Walker magazines in Japan that exhaustively catalog various pursuits, and the Ramen Walker editions are mind-bogglingly intense soup nerd-outs. They feature pictures of the soup at every shop listed in them, so even if you can't read the text, you can find ramen that looks good to you, then have someone who can read the address poitn you in the right direction. Back to the Story ↑

4 Every place I took Hazel treated her like a welcome guest at the meal. All—from high-end spots to fish market stalls—had sets of kid's tableware, which pleased her to no end. With patiences and a handle on the word arigato ("thank you"), a kid can do very well for herself in Hokkaido. Back to the Story ↑