Monday 18 October 2010

Suburban Sapporo Food: Halsanchi

This one probably won't be of much use to anyone, but it was a nice place and it seemed worth mentioning because, who knows - maybe there are English speaking residents of Shin-Kotoni that don't know about the place!

Shin-Kotoni being a suburb up North from Kotoni itself, about half an hour from the centre of Sapporo and on precisely no-one's list of 'must see places' in Sapporo. Nevertheless it's not a million miles away from where I'm sitting right now and so, driving back from someplace or other, hankering for nasi-goreng, we went to Halsanchi.



Halsanchi is a nicely shabby (I trust that isn't an oxymoron to anyone) bar/restaurant that looks to have been named for the owner's dog, Hal. The name is a compression of Hal-san's House, and there were dog pictures and knick-knacks all over the place, along with a zillion other pieces of decor that looked to have accumulated on the walls with minimal consideration given to design. There's a hand-painted portrait of Hal on the wall and, sadly it dates from 2000. I'm no good with dog years, but I'm thinking that if he was full-grown in 2000, Hal probably ain't with us anymore. It's sad, but the restaurant is a nice memorial for him.

I would recommend Halsanchi to people who like home cooked food from practically any country in the whole damn world. Their slogan is something about food from many different countries and they aren't kidding. Chinese, Italian, Mexican, Turkish, Vietnamese, Indonesian... a whole bunch of national adjectives from all over the world basically. Hell they even had fish and chips. For the most part it's the famous dishes that they serve, but the sheer variety of the menu made me want to make multiple repeat trips just to see, for example, what their pizzas were like.



We had a Thai chicken soup thing, that nasi-goreng we'd been craving, some kind of Korean chijimi and fried chicken done in the style of some Asian country or another (I think it might have been Thai again). It was all good, satisfying food, done in a simple home-cooked style. Everything was made by the incredibly harassed-looking Master who was running the entire place single-handedly when we arrived. Oh! I just remembered they had carrot cake too! Carrot cake! The first time I think I've ever seen it in Japan, although to be honest, it wasn't much like any carrot cake I know. It was, however orange, and that must count for something.

I'll mark it on the map, and I'm curious to see where it actually falls - y'know geographically. I don't reckon many people will be making the trip out there, but I liked it, and I'll be going again.

1 comment:

  1. Just found your blog and wanted to thank you. I moved to Sapporo a few months ago and your blog will come in handy. Thanks!

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