There’s Never Been a Better Time to Eat Hokkaido Food in the United States

Hokkaido has long been known throughout Japan for its food: Kaisen rice bowls featuring seafood from the surrounding cold waters, fatty ramens topped with corn kernels, fresh soft serve made from local dairy, and grilled lamb are among the Japanese island’s more well known offerings. 

Now, the food from Hokkaido is proliferating across the United States—introducing more diners to the distinct food culture in the region, which ranges from bowls of ramen to swirls of rich soft serve. In Manhattan you can find crowds clamoring for Hokkaido soup curry outside of shops like the Upper East Side restaurant NR. On the other side of the country, lines form outside of Indigo Cow in Seattle for Hokkaido soft serve. And home cooks are madly cooking their way through Hokkaido milk bread recipes from sites like Food52 and King Arthur Baking Company.

Hokkaido is a Japanese prefecture and inhabits the second largest of the Japanese islands. It’s north of the main island of Honshu, on which cities like Tokyo and Kyoto are located. Hokkaido is inhabited by an indigenous Ainu population, and was not fully incorporated into Japan as a prefecture until 1947. Because Hokkaido is separated from the Japanese mainland, it has developed its own distinct culture. That extends to its food.

American diners may already be familiar with Hokkaido-sourced seafoods because of the popularity of sushi, but other foods from Hokkaido have been gaining more prominence. Ramen Santouka opened its first U.S. shop in 2014 in Bellevue, Seattle, Bake Cheese Tart opened its San Francisco store in 2018, and an explosion of Hokkaido-branded dessert shops has followed. 

Chikara Sono, who grew up in Hokkaido, knew he wanted to serve food inspired by the region when he opened his New York restaurant Kappo Sono in 2022. “There is something about Hokkaido,” Sono says, that produces vegetables, seafood, and even wine that he believes tastes differently from that of other parts of Japan. Hokkaido is large—32,000 square miles—and surrounded by cold water, explains Sono, and has the expanses necessary for cultivating this wide variety of foods. He notes that Hokkaido’s seafood in particular is unparalleled, and sought after by restaurants in the rest of Japan. Believing strongly in the prefecture’s food, Sono imports rice from the island, insisting that foods from Hokkaido taste more distinctly of themselves than food from other parts of Japan. His customers are excited when he explains that the rice they’re eating comes from Hokkaido, he says. 

Takashi Igarashi, the head chef at NR, speaks fervently about the quality of Hokkaido ingredients and the uniqueness of the prefecture’s cuisine. "Potatoes, corn, carrots—so much of Japan's best produce is from Hokkaido," says Igarashi. In an homage to Hokkaido, where Igarashi grew up, he added soup curry to NR’s menu when he joined the restaurant in 2020. Soup curry is an expression of Japan’s love for curry spices, and is distinct from the roux-thickened Japanese curry that is beloved in the U.S and mainland Japan. Soup curry features a thinner dashi broth base, along with toppings like fried slices of kabocha squash, hard-boiled eggs, and braised chicken drumsticks.

Along with soup curries, hokkaido is known for ramen, particularly in the Asahikawa region at the center of the island. Asahikawa even features its own Ramen Village, where there are eight ramen restaurants on one strip. While ramen shops throughout Asahikawa offer their own variations of the dish, Asahikawa is known for a broth that draws from both seafood and pork and is finished with Japanese soy sauce. The Asahikawa-based restaurant chain Ramen Santouka sells bowls of this Hokkaido-style ramen at outposts in cities including Boston, Chicago, and Edgewater, New Jersey. 

While the island’s signature soups and ramens have gained prominence in the U.S., Perhaps no item is as tied to Hokkaido’s reputation as dairy. Cafes in Hokkaido offer various types of milk for lattes and dairy-based treats such as cheesecake, creamy truffles, and cheese tarts. In the same way that Vermont butter and cheese are recognized throughout America, Hokkaido has a reputation for high-quality dairy that is, on average, higher in fat than its U.S. counterpart. Whole milk from Hokkaido is often at least 3.5 percent fat, while whole milk in America hovers around 3.25 percent. 

This would explain why, when Sono first arrived in the U.S., he found that, as he puts it, “American milk tastes like water.” Keisuke Kobayashi of Indigo Cow, a Hokkaido soft serve shop in Seattle, was similarly disappointed about the quality of local dairy. He worked for two years to import Hokkaido dairy before opening his shop in 2021, offering soft serve that the Seattle Times praised as “flirtatiously sweet” with “natural hints of vanilla.” Whereas vanilla is often the default of American ice cream shops, Indigo Cow encourages customers to appreciate the purity of Hokkaido dairy by offering a “Hokkaido milk” soft serve, along with a rotating roster of monthly flavors including black sesame and Japanese sweet potato. 

The allure of Hokkaido’s dairy is possibly why recipes for Japanese shokupan (often called milk bread) attach the label of “Hokkaido milk” to the title. New York–based sake expert Chizuko Niikawa-Helton has noticed Japanese bakeries more recently selling their shokupan as “Hokkaido milk bread,” even when many recipes contain scant quantities of milk. “Even if it’s not made with Hokkaido milk, Hokkaido milk bread sounds so much more delicious,” says Niikawa-Helton. 

In other words, the bread hasn’t changed—but the marketing has. It’s a signal of Hokkaido’s growing recognition in the U.S. There is no better way to capture this change in marketing than in sushi—perhaps the most enduring and popular of Japanese foods in the United States. As explained by Yoko Yamaguchi, the general manager of Sushi Ginza Onodera in New York, the restaurant sources fish from all over Japan depending on seasonality, but sees many “happy smiles” of recognition when customers are told that Hokkaido is the source of their uni, scallops, and crab. “More diners are curious about where in Japan their food is from,” Yamaguchi says. “Guests are becoming more aware of the different specialties of the various regions of Japan. Hokkaido is probably the best recognized and valued out of all the places today.”