Eating in Hyogo
Try these dishes while you are here.
Try these dishes while you are here.
Order the first one and work down the list.
We recommend ordering this one first.
The beef the world knows. Lunch sets at the same counters cost a fraction of the evening price.
Softer, eggier cousins of takoyaki, dipped in clear broth rather than sauce. Only really done in Akashi.
Crab at Kinosaki from November, which is when that hot-spring town is fully booked.
The largest brewing district in Japan, with museums you can walk between in Kobe.
A whole sweet onion in a bowl of soy ramen, on the island that grows the onions Japan cooks with. Sweet rather than sharp. An hour from Kobe across the long white bridge.
Small shops, no English sign outside, and worth the walk.
Aioi is a small city on the line between Himeji and Okayama, and almost nobody gets off. Ramen here is under a thousand yen and the shop opens every day of the year.
Akashi makes its octopus balls soft and eats them dipped in hot broth, not with sauce. In the covered market street by Akashi station.
A butcher since 1885, now a counter where the cook grills the beef on an iron plate a metre from your plate. Ten minutes on foot from Sannomiya station.
Himeji eats its oden with grated ginger in soy sauce, poured over or dipped into. This counter is inside the station building, a few minutes from the castle.
Awaji grows onions so sweet they are eaten raw. This hilltop building looks down on the whirlpools in the strait, and its burger is built around a thick slice of that onion.
Izushi serves its soba in five small dishes at a time, and you keep going until you stop. The castle town it comes from is a grid of low wooden houses under a clock tower.
Tamba-Sasayama grows black soybeans, larger and sweeter than the ordinary kind. This dealer sells them dried, out of a row of warehouses that are listed buildings.
The water at Arima comes up carbonated, and the town bakes it into thin crackers. This shop mixes that spring water into the batter and presses them one at a time.
Nada is the brewing district on the coast at Kobe. This brewery keeps its old tools on show and pours samples at a counter downstairs.