Eating in Kagoshima
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.
Berkshire pork raised here, as shabu-shabu or a cutlet. The prefecture’s best-known food.
Shaved ice with condensed milk, fruit and beans, built into a mound. Eaten in the summer heat.
Fish paste fried into cakes, sometimes with vegetables or cheese inside. Eaten hot at the shop.
Distilled from sweet potato, stronger than sake, and the local drink. Hundreds of distilleries.
Pork broth with cabbage, lighter than Tokyo or Fukuoka. The pork is grilled to order and laid on top.
Small shops, no English sign outside, and worth the walk.
Kagoshima ramen is pork broth with cabbage, lighter than Tokyo or Fukuoka. Here the pork is grilled to order and laid on top.
Kurobuta is the black pig raised here. Loin, fillet and seafood come out fried in small pieces, one after another. Three minutes from Kagoshima-Chuo.
A mound of shaved ice poured over with condensed milk and topped with fruit and beans. One is large enough for two people. This is the shop it started in.
Satsuma-age is fish paste mixed with local sweet sake and deep fried. In the covered arcade they fry it in front of you and hand it over hot on a stick.
Karukan is grated mountain yam beaten into rice flour and steamed, which makes it white, damp and springy. Made for the Shimazu lord in 1854 and unchanged since.
Fukuyama ferments black vinegar in earthenware jars left standing outdoors. Rows of them fill the yard here, and the shop sells what comes out of them.
Yakushima is a mountain standing in the sea, and its boats bring in flying fish. This place shreds them over a box of rice, in the town where the ferry ties up.
Keihan is rice with toppings and hot chicken broth poured over it. This place sits ten minutes from Amami airport by car.
Ibusuki is a sand-bath town, and its ontamaran-don tops a rice bowl with an egg cooked in water from that same spring. This one is inside a port market.