🇯🇵 Sapporo

What Sapporo is

Sapporo is the central city of Hokkaido, laid out to a plan on a grid of streets as a base for the island's settlement in the early Meiji years. Its roads are therefore straight and wide, and addresses are given by block — "South X, West Y" — making it an easy city to read on a map. At its centre runs Odori Park, east to west, with the Tanukikoji and Susukino districts to its south and Nijo Market to its east. Winters are deep with snow, summers cool. Rice and vegetables grown in this land of wide temperature swings, and seafood from the seas on three sides, underpin the city's food. The flavours brought by people who moved here with the settlement took root as the food of the north.

Four pillars of northern food

Sapporo's food rests, broadly, on four pillars. The first is miso ramen: spread from postwar street stalls, a rich bowl of miso dissolved into pork-bone soup became a fixture of the cold winter. The second is seafood: ringed by sea on three sides, Hokkaido lines its markets with urchin, roe, crab and scallop, and the seafood bowl over rice is a morning signature. The third is soup curry, born in 1970s Sapporo, a spiced soup with vegetables and chicken sunk in it. The fourth is jingisukan — the history of raising sheep for wool became a culture of grilling and eating their meat. Add the gifts of field and pasture, milk and corn among them, and the table is rich.

How to walk the three routes

Here, Sapporo is split into three routes of distinct character. The Susukino route is a night town — from the alley where miso ramen was born to a shime parfait to close, it suits setting off in the evening. The Nijo Market route is a morning town — urchin bowls, hamayaki and crab soup, walked in the forenoon while the market is lively. The Odori and Tanukikoji route runs midday to evening — soup curry, jingisukan and the corn of Odori Park, joined from south to north on foot. All three lie close to the Odori and Susukino metro stations, within walking distance. Market in the morning, Odori at midday, Susukino at night: choose by the hour and you can taste the breadth of Sapporo's food in a single day.