Sapporo Cafes: Smooch Coffee Stand

Smooch Coffee looks like a company that has been around for a while in Sapporo, roasting beans and providing coffee to cafes, and since May this year they have there own lovely little coffee shop right next to Nakajima Park. Smooch deals in organic coffee with a link to a Santa Cruz, California based coffee supplier (I think...) and their aesthetic in general is one of sun-bleached, easy-going California chic.

The cafe is in a really nice location. There are only a few seats in there, at a front counter that runs along the window, and it's right across from one of the leafy parts of Nakajima Park. It's a pretty nice, chilled view having a big green park right across from the cafe, and one that you don't get often in Sapporo.

Normally at any independent cafe I wouldn't want to give my opinion on the coffee without trying a real, hot coffee. But hell, I'm wrapping this blog up soon and it's sweltering summer at the moment, so I only got an iced coffee I'm afraid.

But I think iced coffee can tell you a lot about the place too. Most iced coffee tastes terrible, like a cold mockery of that wonderful drink, and it's only very rarely that I find a good iced coffee. But Smooch goes into the very short list of places that do an iced coffee that you might order for a reason other than Japan's hideous summer heat. Also, it's served in a hipster-friendly jar, as you can see.

You can buy all sorts of beans there, the coffee was good, the food (including little cornbread rolls) looked very nice (I want to go back and try it), and if you're looking for a coffee shop around Nakajima it's worth checking out. It's on the map, so go take a look!

Sapporo Cafes: Hammock Base Cafe

Hammocks. Do you like hammocks? Talking about this place with my sister I discovered that she has an irrational hatred of hammocks in cafes. I think it comes from living for too long in areas with a high concentration of cafes that are trying just a little too hard, and, for her, the hammocks have become tainted by their association with annoying people. If, however, you harbour no ill will towards swinging seating then Hammock Base Cafe near Sapporo TV Tower is worth checking out.

In one of those like-attracts-like occurrences, Hammock Base Cafe opened just over a year ago in the basement of the same building that houses the ultra-stylish Fabulous Cafe. Hammock Base Cafe's concept is hammocks, but it's a very cool looking cafe all round with a small menu of handmade dishes and a well stocked bar to boot.

Here's where the good shit is:

Hammocks, son. I think we were actually expecting more traditional... reclining hammocks? Slung-between-two-trees hammocks? These are more like chair things, but if you get yourself properly positioned you can stretch right out and swing around a bit. Just try not to knock over your coffee.

There aren't all that many hammocks so I think that pretty often you'll have to wait before getting to sit in one of those low-slung things. We waited sitting at the bar, which is also impeccably cool. Here it is, through the strings of a hammock.

When the hammocks are free you can go climb in, but if there are people waiting you can only dangle for an hour and a half. We got a slice of meat and potato quiche as a snack. It was good, but small. The guy kept telling us it was small, but when it came it was actually smaller than we expected. It was warm, which I think is possibly a mistake about quiche that is commonly made in Japan, but one for which I am grateful since I don't really like cold quiche.

The drinks come in these cool two-tone light plastic mugs. Almost camping style, which I guess goes with the hammocks and the fake grass underneath them.

The coffee was fine. Nothing to write home about, which I kind of guessed because they only had the one coffee drink on their menu.

Hammock Base has all the other trappings of a creative cafe too: handmade crafts for sale, a weirdly eclectic bookshelf to browse, flyers and posters for all sorts of stuff. It's a good place and I'll head back, even if I'm a little worried about trying to eat while sitting in a hammock. Oh, and motion sickness is a possibility.

As I said, Hammock Base Cafe is under Fabulous Cafe, along with another few cool looking places. The closest station is Bus Centre Mae, and we got there, avoiding the snow, by walking along the long underground passage from Odori Station. I'll mark it on my map, and if you don't hate hammocks it's worth checking out.

Sapporo Cafes: DxM

DxM is one of a chain of quite ridiculously stylish coffee shops in Sapporo run by Morihiko Coffee. These include the beautiful cafe converted from an old wooden house in Maruyama (which I cannot recommend highly enough, even if it is so small it's hard to get a seat a lot of the time) and Atelier Morihiko on the street-car line in West Odori, where I once had an almost transcendentally delicious pear tart. Seriously, I had no idea anything made with pears could be that good.

DxM's concept is to pair the same amazing coffee that Morihiko serve everywhere with luxurious doughnuts by  David (which is, I think, a bakery rather than just some dude named David). The coffee is wonderful and the doughnuts are really fancy, expensive doughnuts. And of course the interior is just excessively stylish, a minimalist collision of industrial trappings and an old school house. That makes it sound a little messy, it's not. The place is a gorgeous combination of metal and wood, and it's not until you look at the chain-link fence and industrial lights, then notice the blackboards and school desks that you realise they've gone for some crazy factory/school approach. But not scary and fascistic like Pink Floyd's The Wall. Y'know, the cool industrial schoolhouse approach.

If you like super-stylish, somewhat expensive coffee places then you have to pay the place a visit. I don't really have a whole lot more to add, except to reiterate that the coffee is really good (they roast their own coffee, and note the hourglass they gave me showing how long to let it brew before pouring it) and that the doughnuts really are fancy.

To be completely honest I don't need my doughnuts this fancy, and just nice hearty Mister Donut doughnuts are fine by me, but it was certainly no hardship at all to eat these ones.

It's pretty close to Sapporo Factory shopping mall and I would guess that the closest subway station would be Bus Centre Mae on the Tozai line. Perhaps a fifteen minute walk from Sapporo Station? Let's say so. I'll put it on my map, so go and try the place for yourself!

Sapporo Cafes: Musica Hall Cafe

Musica Hall Cafe is a very cool little place in Odori. They put on a lot of little indie acoustic nights there I think, and while I've never been to one of those it's a great place for coffee or lunch too.

It's on the third floor of this old building, but you should see the sign outside just fine. These snaps are from a while ago, but I've been there pretty regularly since and it never changes (except for the little art installations on the walls). They have a nice, pretty cheap daily lunch deal which can look something like this:

And they have a full menu too, which has things like this:

I like the place. The coffee's pretty good, it's not too expensive and fancy and it's nice and central. I'll put it on my map so do feel free to check it out.

Sapporo Cafes: To Ov

Ok then, let's get back into this. I warn you, I'm going to try and catch up on over a year of lethargy-induced slacking so things might get messy. Since last we spoke Sapporo remains wonderful, although this summer was pure and simple hell, dragging on and on and on... Signs are good that we might be free of it's mercilessly suffocating embrace! Merciless! Ah.

To Ov cafe (pronounced To-On?) is a lovely little gallery/cafe near Nakajima Kouen Station on the Namboku line. There's a small gallery room in one half and a nice little cafe in the other half. Very good music while I was there, from a jazz selection to some mix that included The Beatles, Yann Tiersen and Sufjan Stevens. The place is full of art books and magazines too, which is always nice, and very stylishly decorated. And it has a bathroom almost too classy to use.

Oddly, because I was already thoroughly caffeinated, I didn't try the coffee there. But the lychee juice was great and the coconut curry I had for lunch was great.

Yuki liked her sandwich. Her opinion: too small for the price, but really delicious.

I liked the place and I'm going to try to go back sometime. It's on my map and well worth going if you're looking for a cafe in the area. I'm afraid I'm going to cut down on the addresses and contact details for now so I can post more. You can click on the link in the name above, no problem sir.

Sapporo Cafes and Shops: D&D Department Project and Pippin.

I've been meaning to write about this place for so long. D&D Department Project is a fancy design goods/home wares/furniture/cafe place near Nishi 18 Chome on the Tozai line. It's pretty near one of the places I work so I've been there for lunch a few times, and it's a very cool, minimal, stylish place. For lunch, I'd say it's very nice, but a little expensive. Then again places like this are always good to have around so go take a look if you're in the area!

They actually repainted the exterior since I took this photo if you can believe it. That's how bloody long I've been meaning to do this post. The ground floor is all stylish, functional, minimal (expensive, but of course) stationery and home wares. It looks a little something like this:

No, wait. It looks exactly like that. Upstairs they sell furniture and all sorts of stylish made-in-Hokkaido goods. The cafe part is actually called Pippin, and is off to the left of the ground floor snap I took. They do a few lunch sets, all running to around a thousand yen. I got this type of thing a few times:

That was back when I took the photo of the building last year. And more recently:

An open-face sandwich thing and soup. It was very good but... yeah, I didn't really feel like I got a thousand yen worth of lunch there. Better was when I got the more standard lunch set.

Much more satisfying and also delicious. They have curry lunches as well that (unusually for me, coz I love Japanese curry) I haven't tried.

In case you don't know there's a nice Wallpaper City Guide to Sapporo that features D&D Department Project pretty prominently, along with an interview with Shin Sasaki of 3KG the design firm that runs D&D. Well worth picking that up, because I don't think think it's all that expensive and it's a nice alternative to the usual kind of guide book. No good for touristy sight-seeing, but I never care about that stuff anyway. I'd always much rather just see the city itself wherever I go.

Oh, I'll put this place on my map of course.

D&D Department Project
札幌市中央区大通西17丁目1-7
Odori (as in, it's on the street called Odori, North-South 0 as it were, not in the Odori area) West 17.
Open 12pm to 9pm Tuesday to Friday, 12pm to 8pm on Sundays.
Closed on Mondays.

Sapporo Cafes: Cafe Rosso

I don't really review restaurants and cafes here, I just slap up places I like so that other people know about them. That means that I go to some places that I don't think are all that great and so I don't write about them, because - hey, if you've got nothing nice to say then... y'know. I guess a couple of times I've been tempted to write something telling people to steer clear of a place, but nowhere has ever maddened me enough to actually try and harm their business. Oh! Do you know what? Scratch that. In Tokyo recently I went to Pancake Days in Harajuku, and despite us being the fourth table or so to be seated when the place opened it took them a good 20 minutes to take our order, then over an hour TO MAKE US PANCAKES. The place was busy, sure but the staff were dopey and when the pancakes FINALLY came they really weren't that impressive at all. If you're a popular pancake place in the middle of Harajuku I would think at the very least you'd have your shit together. We only went there because just looking at the line for Eggs and Things crushed my soul, but Pancake Days wasn't much better. So fuck that place.

Phew.

So anyway I was on the fence about writing about Cafe Rosso because I wasn't sure I liked the place. Cons: it's expensive (around 900yen a dish for food, drinks 500yen and only a 100yen off that with the drink set) and the guy who ran the place didn't seem all that happy to see us. Which is to say he was kind of rude. Rudeness in Japan can be measured on a totally different scale to rudeness in the UK of course, and to be honest we're pretty spoiled here. He wasn't rude as such, but he wasn't exactly welcoming.

(An aside: on the way to Rosso we went past another coffee shop whose name I've forgotten, but where our waitress was even ruder than this guy. Maybe it's something to do with being near Sapporo Factory Mall.)

Pros: it's in a great old looking building and it's a really stylish place with an odd mash-up of decor. Oh and, the biggest pro - the food was fantastic and the coffee was great. So yeah, I thought, I can recommend this place.

Rosso is just around the corner from the big Sapporo Factory shopping mall (not the museum site, which is next to the Ario shopping mall). The closest stop on the subway would be Bus Center Mae, but it's not a long walk from Sapporo Station either.

The decor mash-up I mentioned above is about forty percent fishing to forty percent tattoos to twenty percent general retro styling. The counter has a massive array of fishing reels while up on the wall are some leather jackets and tattoo flash. A sign on the counter warns that the place is protected by a 'tattooed bad ass' and the dude did have a lot of tattoos. Perhaps the coolness I felt was his general demeanour - I mean, the cafe was fare more manly than most coffee shops, and I would hardly expect the proprietor of a place like this to be all smiles.

A word on the counter as well: they have a gorgeous, gorgeous wooden counter. That is all. I could've run my hand up and down that thing all day.

I got the kakuni (slow-cooked pork) curry, and it was great.

Good meat, good vegetables, great Japanese-style curry. Yuki had a tomato and eggplant pasta that was also wonderful. The sesame bread you can see at the back there was exceptional.

The coffees after were really good too, so for sheer quality I really recommend the place. Also it's a fun place to sit and look around, and if you like Japanese fishing manga he has a lot of those up on his shelves.

Details!

Cafe Rosso

札幌市中央区北３条東３丁目１番地　福山石油ビル１階

Sapporo-shi, Chuo-ku, Kita 3 Jo, Higashi 3 Chome (North 3, East 3)

Open 11am til whenever and closed on Wednesdays!

And of course, onto the map it goes.

Sapporo Food: Hamburger RISA

Man, I was so glad to find out that this place had opened up again.

Hamburger RISA used to be out West on the Tozai line (and I wrote about it on this blog way back when), but it closed down a couple of years ago in order to relocate to these new premises. That sounded awesome to me, especially since the new place was near the Namboku line and therefore far more convenient (for me at least). But it took so long to reopen that I just figured something had gone awry and that it would never open its doors again. I even went down there last year to check it out only to find that it was still under construction.

But thankfully it did reopen last August. I only thought to check what was going on with the place recently though, so it came as a surprise to me that it'd been open again for a while, and I immediately wanted to check out the new place. The answer - it's bigger and nicer than the old place but with just as much character, and just as small a menu.

You can go back and read my old post from the link up there to find out a bit more about Hamburger RISA, but I suppose I should cover some key points here too. It's run by a jazz/blues guitarist who my girlfriend remembered as being somewhat grumpy, but who seemed very smiley and happy when we went the other day. The menu consists of one item - a hamburger for 700 yen; and the place is a tip. Actually the new place is nicer and less messy than the old one was, but there's still tons of random musical equipment lying around, and piles of weird looking transistors and tubes and stuff. It's great! In fact there's a full band set-up in the corner and it looks like for a while they were doing live music there every Saturday night.

This post is gonna be pretty light on photos, so to take a look go to the link at the top. That's because he actually has a sign on the wall asking people not to take photos, and I ain't gonna argue with him. I also remember talking to him at the old restaurant and him being pretty withering about students who always took pictures of their burgers before they ate them. Don't tell him I take pictures of food all the time, will you? Then again the sign on the wall, like the menus on the tables, is hand written in marker on a tatty, torn-off bit of a cardboard box. So really I could've feigned ignorance if I hadn't already known his feeling about taking snaps of your food.

If I remember correctly he lived in the States for a while and his burger is the kind of burger he couldn't find when he came back to Japan. It's a straight-up burger - 100% beef, lettuce, a big slice of tomato, onions, and home-made pickles. No cheese, but plenty of sauces to put on it if you want. I love it; it's not subtle and it's not perfect, but  it's satisfying and delicious. Plus it's the only thing on the menu.

As for drinks, I think he has an old juicer there that he uses to make delicious fresh orange juice, and the coffee is just coffee, but you can get free refills which is some kind of miracle for me.

Hamburger RISA is pretty easy to get to. It's at North 13, West 1, and the closest station would be Kita 12 Jo (EDIT! I just realised that the closest station is Kita 13 Higashi on the Toho line, but I never get the Toho line so the location of its stations is a mystery to me). It is hidden away a bit though, tucked away from the road behind another building. You should be able to see a sign, and a big rickety-looking metal arch from the road though. I'll stick it on my map of course. I really like the place, and if you like burgers or weird, eccentric looking places you should really take a look.

Details:
Hamburger RISA - North 13, West 1
Open: midday to 8pm.
Closed: Thursdays

Sapporo Cafes: Sarou Houmura

I half-expected Sarou Houmura, a wonderful cafe and gallery in North-East Sapporo, to be in some secluded little glade outside the city. In fact it's about ten minutes from Kanjodori Higashi subway station, in a perfectly normal suburban neighbourhood. The smart architecture of the place though is such that inside you completely forget about the mundane surroundings. Even walking up to the place from the direction of the station it looks just like a pair of anonymous warehouses, and you have to be right on top of the place before you realise what it is.

It's those windows that are the genius point. By setting them all around the cafe part of the building the designer has let plenty of natural light shine in so you don't feel completely cut off from the outside world. At the same time, all you can see is the garden immediately surrounding Houmura, not the more bland buildings of the neighbourhood. It creates the fascinating illusion that you are somewhere far more remote than, in reality, you are. The entrance adds to this feeling as well, that long, winding, high-walled ramp cuts you off from the outside world even before you enter the cafe.

And once you're inside, the cafe part of Sarou Houmura is just the kind of perfect, super-stylish cafe that you can absolutely lose yourself in.

I loved the tables here. I have an unhealthy love of broad, heavy wooden tables, and the ones in Houmura felt like solid, immovable slabs - there for the duration. The chairs too were, I'm pretty confident, the heaviest damn chairs I've ever dealt with in a cafe situation. Holy crap, thank God they were so comfy, because once you were ensconced in one, you couldn't really shuffle it to a more comfortable position. You can probably tell that the whole place was perfectly designed on every level. The toilet was one of those hybrid lavatory/zen retreat deals. Incredible.

All of which is down to the place being owned and run by an artist, Mrs. Houmura, who we recognised from photos as we were browsing around the place after we ate. Connected to the cafe is a gallery space which was showing a range of art by different artists from a local studio when we went. Art is clearly at the heart of Houmura, and there's another building - Shinajina Houmura - just around the corner. That place may be closed for now though, since it looked a little deserted when we walked past. It looks just as cool as the one we went to though, but in a completely different way (there are lots of great photos on the site I linked to, so check it out).

We got a lunch set, ginger pork and lots of great Japanese dishes for 1200 yen including coffee afterwards.

Everything was great, those pickled beansprouts at the top especially, and it was very, very healthy. They do just coffee and drinks too of course, and a 900yen cake set that we saw a bunch of people order, and which seemed to be served on a tile. Painfully cool, which is all the better since the place is run by a little old lady.

I'll mark the place on my map, of course. Like I said it's close to Kanjodori Higashi station on the Toho line, and there's a clear map on the website too.


茶廊法邑（さろうほうむら）

札幌市東区本町1条1丁目8-27

It's open from 10am to 6pm and closed on Tuesdays.

If cool cafes are your thing it's definitely worth a trip, and it's always nice to find interesting things on the Toho line because, I'll be honest, I don't know many. Perhaps I should challenge myself to find some more.

Sapporo Cafes: YS↑O2

Just a quick post for this place. It's nothing astonishing or revolutionary, but it deserves a mention as a nice little cafe/restaurant in the centre of Sapporo. Probably the most interesting thing about it is that arrow in the middle of the name though. I was intrigued as to how that might be pronounced - I've seen a few places in Japan that mash up English and Japanese phonics so that what looks like a nonsense jumble becomes a readable word when it's  explained. But when I asked the lady, she looked at me kind of blankly and said "YSO2" so there you go. Not even an upwardly inclined raising of tone.

YS02 is in the basement of the Minami Ichi-jo K Building right in the middle of Odori. In fact it's right next to the soup curry shop Hiri Hiri that I posted about before. It's a simple, cleanly designed cafe that serves light lunches, simple meals and nice coffee and, not meaning to stereotype, but I would guess that it's popular with women who work in the city centre at lunch time. A bunch of people came and went while we were in there, but I was the only guy and the menu wasn't really offering the sort of hearty, manly fare that pulls in the XY crowd. For an example of the opposite please see the gyoza chain Miyoshino. The only time I've ever seen a woman in the city centre branches of Miyoshino is when my girlfriend was in there, and she spent the whole time talking about how it looked like only single men ate there. Young student-looking dudes kept walking in and ordering twenty gyoza with curry sauce and extra rice.

Anyway, I certainly don't need to be eating a whole flash-fried cow every day so I'm down with having healthier options. I went for taco rice (one of those dishes that Japanese people assume is foreign even though it doesn't exist outside Japan) and it was really nice. This was on the lunch set menu, but I think they have a lot more interesting looking dishes on the main menu.

The coffee was good too, which is important. It's good to know nice relaxing places to go for lunch downtown so consider this marked on the map (it is), and go take a look!

Sapporo Cafes - Kenon

A bit too far to be of use to most people, this one. Still, their bagels and donuts were just heavenly and if you live in the North of Sapporo, or better yet in Shin-Kotoni, then it's nice to know there are nice places around. Right?

Kenon is a stylish little place in a very suburban part of Northern Sapporo that clearly knows its target market is mums and housewives. They had mother's magazines and I'm pretty sure that they're a very 'baby friendly' place considering there were two very young babies while we were there. So it's not a hipster hang-out, but it is very minimal and chic, and really stands out in the area it's in.

It has a small cafe space attached, but I think that Kenon's main thing is baking bagels and donuts for take-out. And they're damn good bagels and donuts, let me tell you. We had chicken and salmon bagel sandwiches, amazing filled donuts and I got a herb sausage bagel to take away that turned out to be a bagel with a whole sausage running through it. It was all seriously good stuff and strongly recommended.

The coffee was good and the people were super friendly. As I said it's probably too far out for anyone to justify the trip out there, but if you're in the area it's great to know about. I've stuck it on my map... here.

Sapporo Food: Raw Food Cafe LOHAS

So there I was, heading back into town after work and making the stupid decision to walk, in the sun, in the summer. I haven't been blogging much this year, but my hatred of the summer remains unabated. Damn you, Summer. Damn you to the hell that shares your searing heat.

Anyway I was thinking 'burger', that a burger would be good, but when I got to Treasures in West Odori it was gone! They're refitting the place now, and I don't know if it'll be Treasures part 2 or something else entirely, but whatever - it wasn't open for burgers that day.

But as I kept walking I went past a place I tried to go to a long time ago, only to find that it only opens at lunch time: Raw Food Cafe LOHAS:

That's the big ol' arch of the building, and if you go up those stairs here's the cafe itself.

From burger to the healthiest of healthy foods. I don't know exactly what LOHAS' philosophy is, but it looks vegan and when I ordered Raw Veg & Avocado rice bowl, that was exactly what I got. It was healthy and delicious, with brown rice and a little side dish for soy and wasabi (I was advised to dip the avocado into that, like sushi, since the avocado didn't have a very strong flavour).

From the place itself and this website, it looks like LOHAS is something of a 'raw foods', vegan and organic hub. I found a link for it on this Japanese Vegetarian and Macrobiotic food navigation site. And in other news, there's a Japanese Vegetarian and Macrobiotic food navigation site! Who knew?! How great is that?

Anyway, LOHAS is only open from 11am to 3pm, which makes it annoying to get to for a lot of people, but apparently you can arrange for them to open for you in the evening if you have enough people. The food was healthy and great, and there was some kind of nut maki-sushi that sounds so odd I really want to try it. It's just at the end of Tanuki Koji, and pretty easy to find, but do check my map out.

Sapporo Cafes: Cafe Morihiko & Wallpaper City Guide - Sapporo

Well, a very happy new year to all of you. I trust you have had a healthy and profitable holiday season? Everyone? Wonderful.

Cafe Morihiko is a wonderful looking place. A beautiful, old-fashioned house converted into a cosy, intimate coffee shop; I'd strongly recommend it to those who like to hunt down good coffee, or who like almost meditatively beautiful little cafes.

No photos of the inside I'm afraid - I just didn't think I could do it justice. It's so snug and enclosed and partitioned into little areas that it wouldn't look right in my amateur photos. It's really something though, and while the assorted fancy bric-a-brac might be a touch too much (a stack of old books and an antique sewing machine in the middle of our large table for example) it's nothing you can criticise considering how comfortable the place feels.

It was busy too, and we had no choice of where to sit when we arrived. Then again, it is a very small place and even though it's split over two floors I doubt they have many seats at all. We shared a large table with the aforementioned sewing machine and a guy who seemed to be working on some kind of complex diagrams, which should give you a clue about the kind of clientele the place attracts.

As you can probably guess if you check their website, they take coffee very seriously too. I had a good rich number which was really delicious. It should go without saying that it's an expensive place, but really it's about par for the course for this kind of place - 500yen and up for a cup of coffee. Their cake cabinet looked bloody delicious too, it's a shame I wasn't in the mood for any.

Morihiko might be a little off the beaten path for some since it's in Maruyama, but if you're around there or fancy the trip it's the kind of place that guidebooks might refer to as a 'gem'. Here it is on my map.

Speaking of guidebooks (oh, see what I did there? like a goddamn blogging ninja I am) the whole reason I found the place and went there on the way back from the shrine (this year's omikuji - kichi, a big step down from last years dai-kichi) was that I found it in this little Christmas present from my Dad:

That's the kind of guidebook that booksellers might refer to as a 'gem'. The Wallpaper City Guide for Sapporo was published very recently, and while it is far (far!) from an exhaustive guide to the city it's a great list of some of the lesser known, cooler areas and nicer shops.

I don't think the Wallpaper guides are aimed at the casual, budget traveller, you know? This book is full of high-end design shops, restaurants that only serve five customers a night and cafes that are also art galleries. However it is also full of the kind of cool, fun, friendly, awesome places that are never normally mentioned in guidebooks.

It certainly won't tell you everything you need to know about Sapporo, but it's a very classy little book, well written and very heavy on the super-stylish photos that make everywhere look awesome and like a place that you want to visit. Also, since it pretty much eschews most of the big places and the chains it's well worth picking up by people who live here. It made me a little smug to find that I know a bunch of the places in here (and that I'd blogged about a few too) but it's also giving me a lot of other great-looking places to check out in the future.

Most of which I will probably blog about in turn, which is how the world works. Don't worry! I'll give credit!

Sapporo Food: Ease Cafe

Ease Cafe stuck in my head with some strange, delayed-reaction device attached to it. About ten minutes after it was suggested that we go there, and after I'd said 'yeah, sure, anywhere's good' it suddenly clicked that I knew the place, that I'd gone past it a bunch of times and noted - oooh, looks like a cozy cafe. Shame it's not exactly central.

There is however, a very good reason for its location - in that the place is on the ground floor of what looks like a ruddy great student dorm. I don't get the impression that it's exclusively the stomping ground of students, but I'm guessing they more than help the place stay afloat.

Inside it's relaxing and welcoming in that... kinda stock contemporary-rustic feel kinda way. That sounds both damning and snooty, but it's meant as neither - just saying that there is a style that a lot of small independent cafes kinda go for. That style of decor and atmosphere works really well for the most part, and is certainly infinitely preferable to the place we ended up in last week which... I mean I didn't write about it for a reason. Yuki's comment was that she didn't know what part of the place she would change first, since absolutely everything was horrible. Ease Cafe isn't like that at all, everything is great, the interior is perfectly executed and since the only thing I'd change would be the lounge covers of punk and new wave songs they were playing, and which I'm sick of, I guess I wouldn't really change anything at all.

They look to have won some kinda local coffee award, which made me regret not ordering something fancy. The blend coffee I got with my meal was fine, but nothing special. I think they build up to special. That said, it's worth bearing in mind that the coffee at almost any independent shop is better than anything you'll get at any of the standard chain shops, and this was no exception. We both got chicken something, which was their recommended dish and which was pretty great.

It's rice and chicken and someother stuff mixed up with some cheese and demi-glace sauce and was perfect for the miserable rainy weather we were escaping from. It looks like they're awfully proud of their range of pancakes, so I'd say you really ought to try those if you go. I would've loved to but I was kinda full.

Ease Cafe is thoroughly recommended as another preferable alternative to all those chain stores. It's a little far North of the city centre, but you should go there if you're in the neighbourhood. It's on the map, so you can do just that.

Sapporo Cafes: Fabulous Cafe

I went to Fabulous Cafe the other day, and thought... wait, have I actually blogged about this place? Or put it on my map? A search of my site says no, I haven't, so I will now.

Fabulous Cafe is a really, really, trendy cafe near to Bus Centre Mae Station, just over the river from the TV Tower (y'know, at the point in Sapporo where there is actually no river, just a road with a river under it, even though the river is still marked on maps). It's actually more a combination cafe/design boutique/men's clothing store - which should give you an idea what it's like. As should this photo:


Sadly I don't seem to have more photos, and it's the kind of place where snapping away might make you feel a little gauche. It's a fantastically cool place where they play nothing but cool music, stock nothing but cool design innovations and cool men's clothes, and you can go and sit in there feeling just... cool.

Of course, it's incredibly expensive.

Well, not so bad really, not like - wincingly expensive. But I know many people who would blanche at the prices for coffee there, and the servings are never what you would call 'generous'. Everything's good though, I took my folks there and I seem to remember my dad saying that the cheese toast (read: cheese on toast) was amazing. He'd have to confirm that though. The coffees are all great though, and I always find the staff there to be incredibly nice too, although, obviously, hipsters. The photo I took up there was from a while ago, and that guy's afro is now long, straight and cool in a totally different way.

The place looks amazing, always, and I think it's really fantastic if you're after a high-end cafe, or just a cool, interesting place to go. They stock D-Bros. stationery, which I love too. But I want to be utterly straight here - it is pretty darned expensive. I never have a problem dropping a little more than usual to go somewhere like this from time to time, but your mileage (as they say) may vary.

I have stuck it on the map, and not before time.

Sapporo Cafes: nesco

I live in Kita-ku, the North ward of Sapporo and I like it here - hell, I even invented a Kita-ku gang sign, so you Higashi-ku and Chuo-ku motherfuckers front at your peril. We have great soup curry restaurants and even a few good cafes! Like this one:


I didn't want to include nesco under the Sapporo food heading, because although it serves food, and what I tried of it was good, I really wanted to recommend it for its atmosphere. For me it's the perfect balance of shabby and trendy, and with no-one else in there when we went and some nice downbeat indie on, we reach a level of almost vegetative mellowness. Check the serenity:


It looks like the guy who runs the place grinds his own coffee and bakes his own bagels (and can teach you to do the same! The bagels that is) which dominate a lot of the menu. The coffee was good, and I tried a "bagel bowl":


That's a bagel, with filling, on top of salad and topped off with a kind of soft, poached egg. It was delicious, especially the bagel, but I can't completely recommend it because the filling was... minimal. I'd like to try other stuff there and certainly intend to go back so I probably will.

But mostly I'll be going back to attempt to reach enlightenment again. And drink coffee. That's enough for me. I have placed it upon the map.

Inside Kapibarasan Cafe Sapporo

Sorry Bunny.

Last week we went to the In The Loop Cafe - currently rebranded as Kapibarasan Cafe Sapporo for a whole month. Apparently there's a permanent Kapibarasan Cafe in Tokyo that's so popular that some tourists from Hokkaido couldn't get a seat when they were in town. So the good people at Kapibara HQ decided to sate the appetite of the Kapibarasan fans of the north with what I believe might be termed as a "pop-up store". I've actually wanted to go to In The Loop for quite a while, I think they specialise in hippyish philosophy and making their own bread usually, but in the absence of that was a whole lot of this:


A delicious rice and avocado dish with a cheese croquet decorated to look like Kapibarasan and a lump of mashed spuds made to resemble his lazy chick friend Namekemonokun. Amazingly, it was really good, and the coffee wasn't tossed off either. And it came in a Kapibarasan mug that I could have picked up in the Kapibarasan gift shop that accompanies the restaurant.


Yuki had dessert, where the Kapibarasan involvement was limited to his face on the ice-cream. Are these dishes being prepared by the regular In The Loop staff? And if so, what do they think while they're painstakingly recreating Kapibarasan's face in worcester sauce?

I didn't want to be too gauche, or spoil the surprise for the die hard Kapi-heads out there so I didn't snap much of the interior, but there are many photos of Kapibarasan soft toys, many pictures of the original character, some computers that we really should have tried where you answer a questionnaire and it tells you what character from the Kapibara-verse you are (there are more than you might think, including a purple rockabilly capibara who makes motorcycle noises), and finally many soft Kapibarasan toys that you can hug while you eat:


Um, ah... honestly everyone else was doing it... well all the girls and Yuki wouldn't so I thought that...

Shut up. His fur is very soft.