Eating in Nagano
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.
Buckwheat grows well in cold thin soil, which is why this prefecture is known for it. Cold with dipping sauce is the way.
Wheat dough wrapped around vegetables or pickles and baked or steamed. Farmhouse food, sold everywhere.
Long cold winters make good miso. Try it in soup and grilled on rice cakes.
Grown in gravel beds fed by mountain spring water. Grated fresh, it is sweet rather than sharp.
Small shops, no English sign outside, and worth the walk.
Vegetable filling wrapped in dough, fried and then baked in a hot oven. You can watch them being made, or make one with your hands. There is a cafe and a deck looking out over the valley.
Buckwheat noodles cut by hand, in the hot-spring quarter above Matsumoto. Lunch only, and it shuts two days a week.
Komagane serves its cutlet dipped in a dark sauce and piled on shredded cabbage over rice — no egg. The ropeway up to Senjojiki cirque starts nearby.
Obuse has grown chestnuts since the 1600s and sent them to the shogun. This shop boils, sieves and sweetens them into paste, cakes and rice.
Sold on the temple grounds since 1736 and still made in Nagano. Chilli, sansho, ginger, sesame, hemp, shiso and orange peel — and you can have it mixed to your own ratio.
Water off the Japan Alps runs through gravel beds here at a steady twelve degrees all year, which is what wasabi needs. You can walk the beds for nothing and eat wasabi at the end.
Shibu Onsen is a stone-paved street of nine public baths, walked in yukata and wooden sandals. This shop grinds its own buckwheat and cuts the noodles by hand.
Narai was a post town on the Kiso road, and its street of inns is kept as it was. Here rice is pressed onto a flat stick, brushed with miso and grilled.
Sakaki grows a small, fierce radish called nezumi-daikon. The juice is pressed out and mixed with miso, and the udon is dipped in that instead of a soy broth.
Okaya cuts its eel open along the back as in Kanto, then grills it over charcoal without steaming as in Kansai.