The Sapporo Food Adventure: Part 1

It has been just over a year when I travelled to Japan with my mum for the Easter long weekend, but I did not go to Tokyo.

I was in Hokkaido! Home of ramen, seafood, dairy (anything made with milk, butter or cream), beer (Sapporo beer anyone?), white chocolate and potatoes. I'm just going to say it right now that we did not have a bad meal throughout the whole trip. I enjoyed Hokkaido more than Tokyo. It's the capital city, but it wasn't overly crowded and not too touristy. Locals were happy to help 2 foreigners navigate the city.

We visited Sapporo and took a trip down to the hot spring town of Jozankei. It took a lot of work, but I was able to plan our itinerary with a focus on food and shopping. Happy to share this map with you here.

We had a short stopover in Tokyo and browsed...

Melon soda (meeron souda) is delicious in Japan - Ichiban's does not compare. It's lurid green with the roundest ball of icecream I have ever seen. Seriously, look at that photo!! Melon soda is rockmelon flavoured fizzy drink, often served with vanilla icecream, it's pretty much the Japanese version of a spider.

We were still peckish, savoury food was in order. Mind you, this was still within the airport terminal at Tokyo.

I will skip most of the travel stuff, after all this is a food blog. The first thing we did after settling down was go in search of one of the highly recommended ramen places for late lunch.

Taxis here have antennae! How cute!

We went in search of Aji no Tokeidai, supposed to be the best ramen in Hokkaido. It was supposed to be in an alleyway dedicated to ramen, called New Ramen Alley (Shin Ramen Yokocho), but we got um, lost, and decided to go into the very end restaurant and order butter corn ramen. Butter, corn and ramen is famous in Hokkaido ;)

Mr. Chef in the corner there starting the prep.

The walls of the tiny shop was covered in posters and photos of celebrities that have been here. Probably not a bad choice then!

My mum chose from the pictures, whereas I insisted that I had to try the best produce Hokkaido has to offer.

Mum had a split plate, pork in miso broth with rice and roe. Good miso broth is...really good. It was Winter, the soup was hearty, a little thick and creamy. The roe was a surprise - it wasn't fishy, very salty and popped and crackled in your mouth.

"Buta-kon ramen" was amazing. It is really rich and flavoursome, very savoury, the corn was so sweet and the butter definitely made the whole bowl naughty but so good. This bowl converted my mum, who hated ramen before this.

Butter corn ramen.

Looking around the supermarket on the bottom floor of Mitsukoshi Shopping Centre.

The thing about Japanese food is in the presentation. All the desserts at the supermarket was either so cute you have to buy one, or looks so good that you salivate to taste it. We went a little crazy.

Another thing about Japanese food, packaging and service is unbelievable. Gave us a cute little cold pack to keep the cakes cool because we said we were taking these back to the hotel after having a walk around. But say, I meant 'communicated' in broken Japanese and English.

Hokkaido strawberries!

Gotta try the milk here. Pretty creamy and fragrant.

This is a $150 mango, holy shit.

Not food, but a street vendor making kitty frames.

For dinner, we went for okonomiyaki (Japanese cabbage pancakes) at Okonomiyaki Makka. Nice ambiance and if you choose to sit at the bar you can watch the chef cook. Unfortunately the menu is in Japanese, and the best I could do was identify "okonomiyaki" and choose from there.

I could recognise tori (chicken), buta (pork) and mochi (glutinous rice cake). It was a matter of point and hope for the best lol.

The table we sat on had a hole in the ground.

Then we had a waiter bring the ingredients and cook for us on the stove.

I have no idea what we ordered, but there was meat, lots of cabbage and mochi!

Pretty satisfied that it was tasty despite not exactly knowing what we ordered. It was the end of Day 1 and time to head back to the hotel, when we came across a man walking around in a pikachu costume in 8C weather.