Location: Sapporo, Japan
Author: My Husband
Our last stop on the trip before heading home was the city of Sapporo in northern Japan. We have visited quite a few places in Japan in the last several years, but all of them were located on Honshu island. This was our first time in Sapporo, which is situated on the northern island of Hokkaido.
It took us a little while to get from HK to Hokkaido (my wife will probably roll her eyes at my definition of “little”). We first had to fly from HK back to Singapore (on a SQ A380 – nice!), and then waited 4 hrs at Changi for our overnight flight to Tokyo Narita on yet another SQ A380. We waited out a 3 hr connection at Narita in the ANA lounge, then spent another 2 hrs on a regional flight from Tokyo Narita to Sapporo New Chitose. 
I didn’t mind the flying – airplanes are almost like a third home for me anyway – but Christina thought I was nuts.
Pretty sky somewhere between Tokyo and Sapporo.
A glimpse of the outlying areas surrounding Sapporo – very agricultural. What a difference compared to the built-up areas surrounding Tokyo.
Oh yeah – funny story on the flight from HK to Singapore. My wife, who is now a certifiable Iberico ham fanatic, found some good-quality jamon Iberico de Bellota at Seibu’s “Great” food hall, so she bought a small pack to eat on the flight. In the air, she shared some of the ham with my Aunt, and before long, I had two hysterical women lamenting the fact that Iberico wasn’t available in Singapore or Canada. Great… (We later found out that Iberico ham is available at Bosa Foods and Oyama Sausage. Oyama Sausage has the better quality ham from acorn-fed pigs – jamon Iberico de Bellota. Bosa Foods only sells regular jamon Iberico. Christina will be writing a post about this soon enough..)
We got into Narita at around 7:30 in the morning. I slept a little during the flight, so I was feeling pretty good. My wife on the other hand, didn’t sleep much and promptly fell into a deep slumber while sitting upright in the ANA lounge. Since my company was fast asleep, I took a leisurely shower and amused myself by pouring beverages, one after another, using the infamous Japanese beer machine in the lounge.
This is a typical self-serve beer machine in the ANA lounge. You put a glass in the metal holder and press the start button. The machine then tilts the glass and dispenses the beer until you press the stop button. The automated tilting action ensures a perfect head of foam every time. Yes, it probably was too early to drink, but hey, I was on vacation.
Typical Japanese attention to detail. Beer glasses were kept cool in the fridge. Only Japanese airline lounges serve Pocari drinks – I was tempted to have a can to relive my youth, but draft Sapporo won out in the end. The white liquid in the top shelf? Hokkaido milk, imho, the best tasting milk in the world.
The ANA regional flight got us into Sapporo in the early afternoon and we made our way from the airport to Sapporo Station on the JR Express train. A word of advice to those of you who are thinking of travelling to Japan: pack light. Our bags weren’t large by North American standards, but we encountered some challenges getting them onto and off the train. And when onboard, there really wasn’t any space to put the bags without getting in the way of other passengers. Needless to say, our bags were the largest ones onboard…
We stayed at the Keio Plaza Sapporo, which is located several minutes walk away from Sapporo Station. The following are views from our room:
View to the west. JR train tracks are in the foreground.
View to the east, looking towards Sapporo station.
By the time we were settled in, it was already early evening. The long travelling hours were starting to catch up to us, and we just wanted to get something to eat and turn in early. We didn’t have any idea what we were going to to eat, so we walked out to Sapporo Station to check out what was available.
Now, Japan is the land of plenty when it comes to many things, but food has to be at the top of the list. We strolled into the basement food hall at Daimaru and we were lost in a wonderful maze of food stalls selling an amazing variety of foodstuffs – think super-sized foodcourt on crack (without the chairs/tables) and you’ll get a sense of what we found ourselves in the middle of. Sleep and hunger forgotten, we spent the next hour walking around the Daimaru food hall, and then through the underground mall to the other food halls in the basement of the JR Sapporo Station complex.
One of the reasons we came to Sapporo was for the food, and we knew rightaway that we weren’t going to be disappointed. Something Christina really wanted to eat on this trip was authentic Japanese tonkatsu, or deep-fried pork chop. We were supposed to go to a restaurant in HK to do so, but we never made it there. As luck would have it, we ran smack into a tonkatsu restaurant on one of the dining floors in Stellar Place, a multi-storey mall connected to Sapporo Station. We didn’t wait for an invitation; we stepped right on in.
Tonkatsu restaurant. One of the things about Japan is the discipline and consistency with which malls are designed. In the basement, you will find the food hall. Keep going up the escalators and you will find yourself on the dining floor – restaurants galore. A true foodie paradise, Japan is.
The staff in the restaurant did not speak much English, and we did not speak an iota of Japanese. But this being Japan, we were offered picture menus as soon as the staff realized we weren’t locals. The funniest thing was Christina being mistaken for being Japanese ALL the time, and I will relate a funny story about this in a later post.
One thing that I noticed was the patience that people in Sapporo had for foreigners – they were extremely nice to non-Japanese speaking people, which made things a lot easier for us. In Tokyo and Osaka, people are slightly less patient. The worst experience we had was in Kyoto, where some of the sales people we tried to buy stuff from were downright rude to us. In terms of tourist-friendliness, Sapporo is the perfect city for first time visitors to Japan.
But back to tonkatsu – the picture menu was pretty comprehensive. You could choose the kind of pork, the size of the tonkatsu by weight, the meat to fat ratio, and a host of other stuff. Because Japanese kanji is approx 70% similar to written Chinese, we generally understood the context of the information being presented. I ended up choosing a set meal with a 164g tonkatsu. My wife went all out and chose a 250g piece. After making our choices, our food started showing up pretty quickly…
These were the condiments and “tools” that were placed on every table. On the left, you have the mortar and pestle for grinding up sesame seeds, a bottle of which you see on the right; the ground sesame paste is used as a sauce for the tonkatsu. Next to the mortar and pestle, you have a selection of salad dressing. Next to that, you have one jar of sweet sauce and another jar of spicy sauce.
This trio of pickled vegetables were presented to us before our tonkatsu arrived. All were very good, and we ended up eating quite a bit of the middle one, as well as the one on the right. Also served, but not photographed, were two bowls of very tasty miso soup.
Then these were served.
Tonkatsu – perfectly fried with no excess oil. And tonkatsu is always served with a healthy heaping of shredded cabbage. Guess the greens balance out the fried pork chop. This was my 164g order.
This was Christina’s 250g order, which was sliced before serving. See how light and crispy the panko crust looks? Also, see how thick the tonkatsu is? It puts to shame all the pale imitations served at the Taiwanese and Japanese restaurants in Vancouver.
Another view of the pork chop. It was fully cooked (no medium rare doneness here), very moist, and had the perfect ratio of meat to fat. The texture was superb, and very umami tasting. It was, in a word, awesome.
Last but not least, two bowls of Japanese rice were served. Now, Japanese rice is very premium stuff and is not usually exported out of Japan. (The Japanese rice we buy in North America is grown in North America). The rice we had was soft, fluffy, and pleasingly starchy – it was superb. My wife, who usually doesn’t eat much rice, finished her whole bowl. She also had rice every morning for breakfast, so you know it’s gotta be good…
With our hunger fully sated, we made our way back to the hotel and settled in for our long-awaited sleep. But the tonkatsu was a really perfect way to start our vacation in Sapporo, and it was just a teaser of the great things that were to come…
In the next few posts, we’ll talk about seriously good eats in Sapporo…
