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in Hakodate

Dining in Hakodate

Hakodate dines on what the dawn boats unload. The southern Hokkaido port has been Japan's busiest squid harbour since the 1880s, and the morning market (Asaichi, behind Hakodate Station) opens at 6am with three hundred stalls selling king crab, scallop, sea urchin, salmon, ikura and the hairy crab that the city's restaurants build their winter menus around. By 10am the seafood has moved into the kitchens; by lunch it is on counters across the city.

The dining map runs along the bay. The Asaichi morning market and the Donburi Yokocho seafood-bowl alley behind it form the breakfast district. The Bay Area (Motomachi-Nishi) — the warehouses behind the harbour — hold the converted-brick beer halls and several of the better French and Russian-influenced rooms (Hakodate's pre-war foreign concession left a small but persistent western-cuisine tradition). Goryokaku, the star-shaped fortress at the city's centre, has the higher-end sushi and kaiseki rooms; the streets running south from Goryokaku Park hold the local chains, the late-night ramen counters, and the Lucky Pierrot burger branches that exist only in this city.

Reservations are useful but rarely strict. The morning market and Donburi Yokocho take walk-ins by definition; the Bay Area beer halls and tourist-facing rooms have English menus and accept walk-ins outside summer weekends; the higher-end sushi rooms (Sushi Tatsumi, Otsubo) want a few days' notice. Shio-ramen — Hakodate's speciality, a clear, salt-based broth that almost every ramen counter in the city makes its own way — is best at 11pm rather than at lunch; the Goryokaku-area counters stay open until 1am.

Pair the seafood with Hakodate's local sake — Goten, the Goryokaku-area brewery, makes a clean dry style that pairs well with raw fish, and the bay's Hokkaido beer halls pour Sapporo on tap. End any serious dining day at one of the Mount Hakodate funicular's evening services; the night view of the city, with its narrow isthmus and dual-bay harbour, is widely-rated among the world's best urban panoramas and gives the meal an epilogue.

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