Eating in Iwate
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.
A server refills a small bowl of noodles until you put the lid on, keeping count. It is a game and a meal.
Flat noodles with miso meat paste and cucumber, mixed at the table. Finish by cracking an egg into the bowl.
Chewy cold noodles in clear broth with kimchi and pear on top. Cold, and unlike anything else here.
Oysters from the ria coast, grilled or raw, at their best in winter.
Small shops, no English sign outside, and worth the walk.
Someone stands beside you and drops a mouthful of soba into your bowl the moment you empty it. You stop by putting the lid on while they are watching — and the bowl has to be empty first.
Flat warm noodles under miso paste, cucumber and spring onion. You mix it yourself, and at the end you crack an egg into the bowl for soup.
Morioka reimen is a chewy, almost transparent noodle in cold beef broth, with half a boiled egg and a slice of watermelon or pear on top. Two minutes from the station.
One long soft roll, cut open and filled to order from about fifty tubs — sweet bean, peanut butter, custard, or fried food and salad. Morioka has eaten these since 1948.
Nanbu senbei are baked in iron moulds, which leaves a thin frill of dough around the edge that people argue about eating. Sesame is the plain one; peanut and squid also exist.
A department-store dining hall on the sixth floor, still run the way such places were run decades ago. The soft ice cream is wound ten times and stands well above the cone.
Hiraizumi was a capital of the north, and its temples and garden are World Heritage. Rice cake is the local dish, brought as a tray of small bowls with different toppings.
Tono grills its mutton over a bucket of charcoal. The shop is twelve minutes on foot from the station, in the town of folk tales.
A salty vegetable broth with dumplings in it — and the dumplings are sweet inside. Kuji City describes the taste as salty but sweet at the same time.
Ichinoseki has its own mochi food culture — the city counts more than 300 mochi dishes. This place serves the traditional mochi meal in one-bite portions, at lunch only.