Sapporo Food: Soup Curry King

Soup Curry King is a popular place. It's not all that small a restaurant, but when I went in there for lunch I was lucky to get a seat, and people were arriving all the time and having to wait, or simply being turned away. And that was in the middle of a blizzard!

It looks like Soup Curry King hasn't been open all that long in the grander scheme of things (thinking geologically perhaps, it only opened in 2007) but a lot of people seem to like it. I've seen it mentioned in various places, and last year at Autumn Fest (the big foodie festival in Odori park) they had a special soup curry stand with a rotating line-up that featured King several times. That, and of course the swinging door this freezing lunchtime speaks for itself.

I got the lamb and vegetable curry, and I could taste straight away why the place is so popular.

It's a very light-looking soup, but the flavour was smooth and very satisfying. It's always tough to really nail down the differences between soup curry places in writing, but the soups really are so distinct once you've tried a few. King's soup was a little oily, but a really nice consistency - not too thick and not too thin. The spice levels are named, cutely, after a suit of cards (up through Jack, Queen, King to Joker) and I got a number 4, which the menu called your basic hot taste. 3 is recommended but I could have gone hotter than 4, and others will be able to take a lot more.

The vegetables were vegetables, nice but I've had sensational vegetables at other soup curry places so this wasn't the best. The lamb however, was sensational - so soft and juicy. You can't really see it in the picture there since it was buried under the veg, but there was plenty of it and it was great.

Soup Curry King is near Minami Hiragishi station on the Namboku line, and it's well worth a visit. It reminded me of Medicine Man, another really popular soup curry restaurant with the quality to support its reputation.

I'll mark it on my map, of course, and here's the address and opening times coz I'm nice like that:

Soup Curry King

札幌市豊平区平岸3条16丁目1-1

Open for lunch 11.30am to 3pm.

Dinner is 5pm to 11pm (last order at 10.30pm).

Saturdays, Sundays and holidays it's open 11.30am to 10pm all day (last order at 9.30pm).

And it doesn't have any regular closed days.

Sapporo Food: Maruyama DRiLL

I guess I was thinking about burgers a lot recently or something because when I realised I had a couple of hours free to go somewhere interesting for lunch I remembered Maruyama DRiLL. I tried to go there a while back, but although  their schedule said they ought to have been open, they were closed. It's no big deal, that kind of thing tends to happen with small, independent places in Japan, but I never got around to going back. Today, I half expected it to be closed too, but while it was freezing bloody cold outside, it was toasty warm inside.

That's the freezing cold exterior. It was only walking up the stairs that I deciphered the logo, which I'd seen a bunch of times before: the circle = maru; the triangle is a mountain = yama; and the triangle with lines is a drill. Obviously! I didn't snap any photos of the actual cafe inside, but I really should have since it's a super-stylish place. If you head to the website, you can check out plenty of snaps, of both the bar and the lovely staff. Here instead, just imagine a stylish bar arranged around this gorgeous burger.

The menu here looks really good, and I really want to go back and try some different things. Their main things are burgers and curries, both of which look great. It also looks like they recently added pasta to the lunch menu as well. I'd like to say it was hard for me to choose, but really if a place says they do good burgers then 99% of the time that's what I'm going to get. I chose a cheeseburger, and the plate up there was 800yen (I got the orange juice lurking in the background for an extra 150yen). They've got a pretty big range of burgers, nothing too revolutionary, but they did have a ridiculous looking triple-decker for about 1800yen. Considering that this was a tall burger to start with I can't imagine how that stays upright but still. You can add extra patties as a topping too actually.

It was a good burger. The patty especially; I'm not sure if it was 100% beef but it was juicy and delicious. Again, not the best in Sapporo, but worth your time if you're a burger fan and of course a cut above your average fast-food joint. I'll definitely be going back there, and even though I'll try and be strong, try and break my mold... I'll probably just end up getting a burger again.

It's about two minutes from exit 1 of Maruyama Kouen station, and I'll mark it on my map.

maruyama DRiLL
北海道札幌市中央区北1条西27丁目1-7 2F
Lunch is from 11.30 to 4.00 (last order at 3pm)
Dinner is from 5.00 to midnight (last order at 11pm)
And now I notice that they don't have any fixed days off, hence I was disappointed the first time I went. Might be worth phoning ahead? Think on't.

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 Food: H's Cafe

Just starting to write about a restaurant in Sapporo that does burgers started me on an internet search for Kitchen Yonoji+Jr. which was one of my favourite places in Sapporo. What happened to that place? I think it just closed down, and I miss it, but I just found an address and I'm not sure if it's the original address or... maybe I'll check it out... Oh, it's the original address. Yup, looks like that place is gone.

Anyway, H's Cafe is a cafe/bar kinda place in Susukino that opened up in October last year, and I was pretty impressed when I went there.

On the boards outside they make their burgers sound like their big thing, and they were good, but they have a variety of other stuff on their menu too. Other stuff that I studiously ignored because when a place looks like it has good burgers, that's probably what I'm going to get.

Oh, we got onion rings too, and they were really good! And interestingly served!

Actually one of the great thing about H's Cafe is that everything is really very reasonable. The beer is cheap, and when I saw how cheap the burgers were on the menu (400 or 500yen) I thought that they'd be some kind of mini, bar-snack sized affair. Luckily, I was very wrong.

That's the ABC burger, (Avocado, Barbecue, Cheese) and the NBA burger (Native Big American I think it was...). The former was 400yen, the big double was 500yen. The fries came with. Man, I don't know about you, but for a decent burger at a bar in Japan that seems pretty great to me. That NBA burger is pretty damn big. Let's have a close-up of that bad boy shall we, since the patties are shrouded in shadow there...

I say thee yay! And they were good burgers! Not the best in Sapporo, but greasy and sloppy and satisfying and we left the place stuffed and a little drunk for really not much money. If you want burgers and beer in Susukino, or if you just have a hankering for 'American' decor and a giant Budweiser banner then you really ought to check it out. They have Mountain Dew, which - I've never really understood, but there you go.

H's Cafe is really near Susukino station, just over the road from the Susukino Mister Donut branch, and I have, of course, marked it on my map. Hey! Why don't I give you some address and opening times details too?

H's Cafe
〒064-0804 北海道札幌市中央区南4条西2 ホシビル1F
That's South 4, West 2, Hoshi Bld. 1F

And their opening hours are, quite awesomely:
Mon-Sat 6pm-6am
Sunday 6pm-Midnight.

Man, now I want to go eat burgers at four in the morning. Oh, who am I kidding, that'll probably happen.

Sapporo Food: Kanako no Soup Curry-ya san

Just a quick one I think. Yesterday a comment on this blog inspired me to go check out some new soup curry. I wanted to hit up one of the recommendations I've received, but ended up wandering around deserted streets looking for a shop that had closed down, and when I found it I realised that I'd tried to go there before and found it had closed down. Smart work, I'm sure you'll agree.

So in the end I went to Kanako's Soup Curry Shop, which I've walked past countless times (one of my favourite cafes is in the same building) but never eaten at.

Kanako's started here I think, and although this is their only store in Sapporo they also have a branch in Hakodate and two in Sendai. That kind of 'soup curry outreach' is highly commendable. The quicker soup curry spreads properly outside Hokkaido, the better chance I have of not having to go cold turkey when I travel. I kid. A little.

I just had their standard vegetable curry and it was nice. They use a spice-blend from Sri Lanka apparently, and the soup curry flavour was good, but I wouldn't rave about the place. The ingredients too (Hokkaido sourced) were good but not sensational. I think I probably need to try one of their recommended dishes to see the best of the place of course, but overall I'd say this place is worth going to if you want soup curry but you don't really mind not being blown away. Spice-wise they have a scale that goes to 100 and that gets spicy around 20 apparently. I had a 25 and for me that was a pretty mid-range spiciness.

Oh! Y'know what I've been meaning to start posting addresses and opening hours for these places, since that's the kind of thing might be seen to be somewhat useful right?

Kanako no Soup Curry-ya san (Kanako's Soup Curry Shop)

北海道札幌市中央区南1条西1丁目2-2  大沢ビル1F

Sapporo, Odori, South 1 West 1

Open Weekdays 11am-3pm and 5pm-9pm (9pm last order)

Open Weekends 11am-9pm (9pm last order)

...and it looks like they don't have a holiday!

It's nicely located really near the TV tower, and I've stuck it on the map. Hopefully soon I'll be able to check out one of the soup curry places that people love and that I haven't had a chance to get to!

Sapporo Food: Yakumo Goma-soba

I try to avoid writing about chains of restaurants here. I figure that you hardly need me to tell you that there are a bunch of McDonald's or Starbucks or Tully's Coffees in Sapporo. But then I'm never sure whether or not to put up some stuff about the local Sapporo and Hokkaido chains like the yaki-tori chain Kushidori or (and this one I'll never bother with) the hamburg steak chain Bikkuri Donkey. If you live here then these places are so common that it'll seem pointless detailing them, but if you're only visiting then knowing about places you can eat pretty well for not much money could be really useful. AND SO - I decided to do a post about the soba restaurant chain Yakumo.

There are Yakumo's all over the place in Sapporo and they're all a little different but they all do very nice soba. Soba has always been one of my favourite Japanese foods - buckwheat noodles that can be served cold or hot and eaten in a few different ways. I'd guess the most common way that soba is eaten though, is cold. You get a tray of soba noodles, some soba sauce to dip the noodles in and often some tempura to go with them. It's great, and healthy and I love it.

I sometimes go to the Yakumo in the basement of 4chome Plaza next to Odori station, because it's conveniently on my way home sometimes, and I sometimes go to the one in the PASEO section of Sapporo station for the same reason, but mostly I go to the pretty fancy one on the top floor of the department store PARCO. So let's talk about that one, huh?

What sets Yakumo apart from other soba places is that they serve goma-soba, that is they use sesame in their noodles. What does this look like? Little black bits in the grey noodles. What does it mean for the taste? Ehhh, I'm not sure. It's subtle. They're a little harder? Anyway they're delicious. Every now and then they've told me that they're serving 'Shin-soba' that day, which means not goma-soba, but the noodles are still great. They're also a Hokkaido company which means lot's of Hokkaido sourced ingredients and Hokkaido big-upping in their menu.

Here's what my girlfriend got the day I took these snaps. I think it was torori soba? The bowl at the top right has a raw egg and a bowl of grated mountain potato - very sticky. That's not really standard, but the noodles here are presented in a really standard way. The bottle has the soba sauce and in this case she added that to the egg bowl, then added the spring onion and wasabi (to taste, as they say) and picked up the noodles and dipped them in the mixture. I think. Man, I don't want to sound patronizing about this, but God knows I've been a bit baffled by the bowls and bottles presented to me at soba restaurants.

And here's what I get most of the time when I go there: ebi oroshi soba. This particular Yakumo has a great evening meal deal where you can choose one of six main dishes to go with a few side dishes for 980yen, and you can add a beer for 380yen more.

So, let me explain what's going on here. The soup from the bottle in the middle goes into the bowl and you mix in as much wasabi and spring onion as you want. Then you add the various things on top of the soba and mix those in as well, and when you can see enough of the noodles to get at them, you dip them in the soup! The tempura shrimp there also get dipped in the soup - IF YOU WANT! And there at the back, the salad and the baked rice-ball are part of the meal set. The yaki-onigiri (rice-ball) has cheese inside and is awesome.

The beer, you drink.

Oh! And last but by no means least you'll always get a pot of soba-yuu at soba restaurants. That square red pot in shadow at the back is the soba-yuu - that's the water that they cooked the noodles in. At the end of the meal, when you've finished everything else, you'll probably still have some of the soba sauce left, so you pour some of the soba-yuu into the sauce bowl to make a soup you can drink.

Isn't soba wonderful? Shhh, no need to answer. I like Yakumo, so if you're in Sapporo looking to have some soba and you see one around, it's probably not going to be a bad meal. This PARCO branch I'd say is good, especially for that evening meal deal so I'll mark it on the map.

Photos from Sapporo Snow Festival 2012

I'm interested to see how Google tying things together could make my life easier, so instead of rambling about another restaurant how about I try sharing some photos instead? I've put up an album of snaps of this year's snow festival on Google+ which I'm still kind of feeling out. STILL. I've been on there forever, or close to it.

So click on the following link and check it out. The album should be public and anyone should be able to see it, but I never take anything for granted.

Sapporo Snow Festival 2012