Hokkaido, here we come! Part 2: Exploring Sapporo - Nijo Market, Shiroi Koibito Park, Sapporo Beer Museum
Good morning from Sapporo!
Breakfast: Nijo Market
Our very first stop this morning was Nijo Market, which was a convenient 5-minute walk away!
Nijo market has a collection of fish markets where locals can buy seafood, and it also has a string of seafood restaurants that specialize in seafood bowls! All of the restaurants open around 7:00AM, so we got there about 10 minutes before then to find our breakfast spot and queue up.
If you’re walking by the different restaurants, you’ll see all the appetizing food models and be so tempted by them (if you like seafood of course). We honestly just picked a restaurant that looked good and waited for them to open.
We ordered on a tablet and then our bowls came pretty quickly! I really enjoyed the fish, I thought it tasted very fresh and delicious! The scallops were my personal favorite, followed by the salmon, then the tuna. Aldrin’s bowl had king crab, snow crab, ikura, and uni. The seafood in his bowl was also delicious! Personally, I felt like there just a bit too much rice and that the rice was a touch overcooked (slightly mushy) and plain? I think the rice typically has some seasoning or rice vinegar, but this bowl just had plain rice.
Other than the rice, though, I enjoyed the bowl overall! I also liked how they had their restaurant name printed on their seaweed using sugar and egg white! So creative!
This spot (and most spots that we ate at in Hokkaido) was cash only.
Shiroi Koibito Park
Shiroi Koibito Park is a sweets theme park owned by the Ishiya company. Ishiya is known for the chocolate, and specifically their chocolate cookie sandwiches!
The park was a subway ride away from our hotel, and we noticed the area as soon as we saw all the cat motifs around the buildings and the gates! I didn’t know how essential cats are to their company! Almost everything is cat themed and so cute.
The exterior park area is open to all visitors and is free to visit. Since we were there during the Christmas season, the park area was all decorated with snow decorations and lots of Christmas-themed decor! Unfortunately since we were so early, they didn’t unravel all the decor yet - I guess they wait until evening to really let it show!
They also have this fun animatronic show that plays every so often throughout the day. It’s cute and fun (and reminds me a lot of Shrek?? 😂)
There’s also a shopping area / gift shop where you can purchase Shiroi Koibito themed merchandise as well as the confectionaries that are made by Ishiya. This area is also available to all visitors and doesn’t require an admission fee.
The Museum
Admission
The museum itself requires an admission ticket. You can either buy them online ahead of time or purchase them at a kiosk on the spot.
Admission to the museum is 800 yen per person.
The museum area also offers some fun workshops that you can sign up for as well, like a chocolate course or tasting course, things like that. These require separate fees and a timeslot reservation, so if you want to do a workshop, it might be best to purchase tickets ahead of time to reserve your spot.
Museum Tour
Once you enter the paid area, the attendant gives a chocolate cookie sandwich as a sample!
This was cute and much appreciated. The sandwich was so good too!
You start off with a small show that talks about the history of Shiroi Koibito, but from there the rest of the tour is self-guided.
As with the outside of the building, you’ll find cats all over the museum from cats on the signage to pawprints on the floor. They’re small little touches, but they’re so cute!
One of my favorite parts of the tour was the chocotopia factory, where they had moving dioramas of chocolate cookie sandwich production line. All the workers in the diorama are these cute cat people, and it was just a fun little display to look at. As a bonus, it was also interactive!
And right across from the moving diorama was the real production line! From giant windows you can look down to the production floor and see the employees making the actual cookie sandwiches from start to finish. So cool!
After going through this are, you’re bright the final floor before exiting to the gift shop. This floor is where all the gift shops are held. There are also a few cute photo op areas as well as a small shop and cafe!
Trial Place COVENT
This was a small little shop on the last floor that sold freshly baked, giant chocolate cookie sandwiches! We decided to grab one of these to try! It was so good, and the chocolate was so decadent! But honestly, it was way too big for me to eat on my own, so I’m glad I was able to share it.
Chocolate Lounge OXFORD
The chocolate lounge is also located on the last floor of the museum tour, and here you can order some cute desserts and drinks in a nice little lounge setting! You could sit by the window with a view of the park, but since that’s a coveted spot, it might be too full!
We took a nice relaxing break here and ordered some desserts to share. We ordered the specialty drinking chocolate, and a soft-service ice cream and sponge cake set.
The drinking chocolate was like a thick, rich hot chocolate. It was pretty good, and while it was a nice sweet desserty drink, it had a more cocoa flavor rather than plain sweetness, which I liked. Though ultimately, I did think it just tasted like a thick chocolate milk, so I probably wouldn’t go back just for it. The soft cream, though, was very good and I really liked the sponge cake as well!
Gift Shop
From the lounge, we exited the paid area through the gift shop, which is accessible to all visitors, no admission fee required. In the gift shop, you can find Shiroi Koibito themed merchandise and confectionaries. We bought some cookie sandwiches for souvenirs and some of their chocolate bars to try. While some items are exclusive to the park, the cookie sandwiches are available at department stores in Tokyo, so if you really want the cookies and can’t make it to Hokkaido, you can still get them!
Overall Impressions
Shiroi Koibito Park is a pretty cute little tourist stop. It was quite crowded with large tour groups and the inside museum is not super spacious, so it made the experience a little less enjoyable. But overall, I had a good time!
If you’re looking for something easygoing to do, this is a cute place to check out! Once you’ve seen it once, though, I think that’s sufficient. It’s a pretty small museum, and if you’re looking for confectionaries to buy, you can find them at stores all over Sapporo and in Tokyo.
Lunch: Sapporo Gurume
For lunch we decided to try out a fresh seafood experience. We visited Sapporo Gurume which is a neighborhood area with lots of seafood markets lining the street. At each of these markets you’ll find fishmongers advertising the seafood they have available, and after finding a spot you like, you can order live seafood that is then cooked in the attached upstairs restaurant.
We weren’t super familiar with the how-to of this whole process and didn’t do much research ahead of time, so we just picked a market and went with it! We purchased a live king crab and ordered it half grilled, half boiled. In the upstairs restaurant we ordered an extra order of scallops and waited for them to prepare our crab.
This meal was pretty good! We mainly tried this for the experience, and overall, it was perhaps a little bit of a letdown. The crab was tasty, but not necessarily more tasty than other seafood that we’ve had elsewhere. The scallops were also good! But overall as a meal, the whole “live king crab” experience didn’t hit the spot the way we thought it would. Maybe it’s because we’re inexperienced or not crab connoisseurs, but in the future, we probably wouldn’t do this again.
Sapporo Beer Museum
Next up we visited another well-known tourist spot in Sapporo, the Sapporo Beer Museum. I’m personally not a fan of beer at all, but Sapporo Beer is iconic and I figured it wouldn’t hurt to check out a little bit about its history.
The museum itself is free to visit and tour, but they do offer an optional paid tour. Since we were more curious than super enthused, we went with the free tour. The building is rather big and there are several exhibits that you can read through to get a better understanding of how beer was made and how historical Sapporo Beer actually is. Each exhibit had information cards in several different languages so we were able to read the English version.
They, of course, had a beer garden where you could order Sapporo Beer as well as the Hokkaido-exclusive Classic. The line for the beer garden was actually quite long and I didn’t see anything on the menu that was exclusive to the museum, so I’d recommend if you were just curious about trying the Classic flavor, just get it at a nearby convenience store.
The gift shop had a lot of Hokkaido-related souvenirs and snacks. I did end up seeing quite a few of these snacks at other stores throughout Hokkaido for cheaper, so if you’re looking to save so money and you plan on visiting more areas, I might wait and get them elsewhere. They do have some cute Sapporo Beer Museum merchandise like magnets and stickers and stuff that I would recommend checking out if you wanted something from there!
The best part for me was the stamp station! I love when places have stamps that I can add to my stamp book!
Pokemon Center Sapporo
We made a quick pit stop at Pokemon Center Sapporo (because we can’t visit a city with a Pokemon Center and not go!). The highlighted pokemon at this Pokemon center was Alolan Vulpix! So cute!
Most of the items are the same across all Pokemon Centers, but sometimes they do have some regional stuff, which is always really cool to check out! And I loved seeing all the Christmas-themed decorations at different stores!
Dinner: Soul Store
Another night, another Hokkaido specialty to try! On this particular night, we decided to try soup curry. The flavor of curry is super prominent in this dish, but the consistency is much thinner like soup (as the name would suggest). I really enjoyed this dish because the weather was so cold, and this dish was sooo warm and comforting. You could literally feel yourself warming up as you ate.
The flavors were very strong and the spices were prominent but not too overwhelming. The broth was rich, and it went so well with rice!
As with most restaurants we visited while in Hokkaido, this shop was cash only.
Dessert: The TEA & Cream Puff
After dinner, we wanted something sweet, and were onto our next milk dessert.
We went to a nearby boba shop because we make it a goal to try boba wherever we go if they have it. We ordered a brown sugar boba milk tea from there. It was really pretty sweet, and the tapioca was decent. Nothing really to write home about, but not bad!
We also picked up a cream puff from Sun Milk Japan which was right next door. This cream puff was delicious! The pastry was light and flaky, and the cream on the inside had the signature Hokkaido milk flavor to it that was so good! We shared one cream puff, but I honestly wish we each got our own.
Day 2 Recap
Exploring Sapporo in the snow was so fun! (but so cold!) Wearing the right gear really helped me enjoy the day, and it just felt so freeing to hang out in the snow! A few must-haves when visiting Hokkaido in the winter: a good warm coat, ear muffs, waterproof shoes, and Heattech clothing (a lifesaver).
Since this was our first full day in Sapporo, we got to try some more foods around the city, and honestly, the seafood was a little disappointing. I guess expecting incomparable tasting seafood is a tall order, but I would just say that Hokkaido’s seafood is not so much better than Tokyo’s, and it’s definitely not more affordable.
I actually found that the foods that surprised me and excited me the most were the dairy/milk products (I’ll take that soft cream all day!) and their produce, like corn and haskaps!
Another delightfully surprising outcome from our day spent in Sapporo: my newfound love for shimaenagas! If you don’t know what these adorable creatures are, they are longtailed tits that live to Hokkaido and other nearby regions. I couldn’t go an hour without seeing some shimaenaga merchandise or drawing or something, and seeing what these birds look like in real life photos (like they’re not just drawn that way??), I was sold! Give me all the shimaenaga goodies!
On our third day in Hokkaido, we headed to a small nearby town called Otaru! It was a very sweet little town where we did something I was really excited for: we made our own music box! Stay tuned for the next post where I’ll talk about it!
