Eating in Okinawa
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.
Thick wheat noodles in a clear pork and bonito broth with stewed pork belly on top. Not buckwheat at all.
Bitter gourd stir-fried with tofu, egg and pork. Genuinely bitter, and the island eats it all summer.
Taco filling on rice with lettuce, tomato and cheese. Born beside the American bases, and now island food.
Round doughnuts, crisp outside and dense inside. Sold warm at markets.
Small shops, no English sign outside, and worth the walk.
Buy a fish downstairs, carry it up to the second floor, and one of the kitchens will cook it for you. The floor is also lined with Okinawan canteens if you would rather just order from a menu.
Hand-cut wheat noodles in a clear bonito broth, with pork on top. Near Shuri, and it stops when the noodles run out.
Steak on a hot iron plate with soup, salad and rice. Okinawa eats steak late, often after drinking, and this kitchen runs until two in the morning.
Kin town sits beside a US base. In the 1980s this shop put taco meat, cheese and lettuce on rice instead of in a shell, and the dish spread across Okinawa.
The company started on the US bases after the war and stayed. The flavours went local: purple sweet potato, sugar cane, salt cookie. The parlour still looks like 1960s America.
Chinsuko was made for the Ryukyu kings before Okinawa was part of Japan. Flour, sugar and lard, baked hard. This shop is a few minutes below Shuri castle.
Pineapples grow in the north of Okinawa, and this park is planted with them. The shop sells the fruit worked into cake, jam and wine, and entry to the field is charged.
Okinawa eats its tofu warm, on the day it is made. This place opens at half past six in the morning and stops when the pots are empty.
Beside the fishing harbour at Nikadori they build a clear soba broth on bonito caught in the water off Miyako.