Sapporo for first-time visitors

Best restaurants

Sapporo's eating culture is tighter than its tourist literature suggests. The central ward sits on a grid, and the restaurants below cluster inside a tidy walking square inside it. Soup curry, charcoal-grilled lamb, and a thick miso-broth ramen are the dialects you will hear about most, but half the addresses on this list are not ramen shops — they are gyoza counters, butadon rooms, charcoal yakiniku, tonkatsu specialists, kushiage griddles, the working lunch and after-work dinner of a city that does not eat for cameras. This is not a survey of Sapporo's most famous miso-ramen window or its most photographed seafood market. The locals eat in places like these, in the same rhythm, year after year, and the chefs cook to that rhythm. Twelve rooms, each defended by its own discipline. Read in rank order or skip around; the city is small enough to do most of them in a long weekend.