Eating in Ibaraki
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.
Fermented soybeans, sticky and strong. Mito is where Japan associates it with, and the local versions are milder than visitors fear.
Monkfish hotpot, thick with liver, eaten on the winter coast. Ugly fish, excellent pot.
More melon is grown here than anywhere else in Japan. Eaten as it is, or as soft ice cream.
Sweet potato steamed and dried into chewy strips. No sugar added, and it tastes as if there were.
Small shops, no English sign outside, and worth the walk.
Pork-bone broth with burnt garlic oil, on the fourth floor of the station building. You do not have to leave the station — useful if you are changing trains or waiting out the rain.
Anglerfish hot pot is a winter dish on this coast: liver mashed into the broth, then the fish and vegetables. Run by the fish wholesaler next door.
Mito has made natto since 1889. The beans are small here, wrapped in straw bundles rather than plastic boxes. Upstairs there is a free room about how it is made.
Ibaraki grows nine tenths of Japan's hoshi-imo. The potato is steamed, sliced and left in the sun for days until it turns amber. There is no sugar in it at all.
Kasama grows a great many chestnuts, and a pastry chef who worked in Paris and Macau came back to press them into threads over cream. The shop is a farmhouse about 130 years old.
The market for the farms of western Ibaraki. Vegetables come in from the fields around it, and the shelves carry Sashima tea grown nearby, along with a bakery and a food court.
Daigo sends its visitors up to Fukuroda Falls. Back by the station, this place cooks the shamo raised in the hills around the town.
One of the eating houses inside the fish market at Nakaminato, and the one that stays open into the evening.
Ibaraki grows a buckwheat of its own called Hitachi aki-soba, cut in autumn. This place north of Mito serves it.
Tsuchiura is lotus-root country. This cafe sits inside a converted merchant storehouse and serves it as curry. The city also lists lotus-root fritters and dumplings around town.