Eating in Tochigi
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.
Dumplings treated as a main course rather than a side. The city has more gyoza restaurants than anywhere else in Japan.
The skin lifted off simmering soy milk, layered and rolled. Nikko’s temple food, and entirely vegetarian.
More strawberries are grown here than in any other prefecture, and farms open for picking from January to May.
Noodles beaten with a bamboo pole, in clear soy broth. Wavy, chewy and light.
Small shops, no English sign outside, and worth the walk.
Five gyoza makers side by side in one basement, with about thirty more rotating through the other counters. You can taste them against each other in one sitting instead of walking the city.
Gyoza fried in sesame oil so the base goes hard and brown. Six to a plate, and people order two or three kinds at once.
Nikko eats yuba — the film that forms on heated soy milk, lifted off and folded. Served as a set of small dishes, on the old street below the shrines.
Sano makes its noodles by pressing the dough under a green bamboo pole, which leaves them uneven in thickness. The broth is clear soy and pork, and the bowl is plain.
Nasu is where the imperial family keeps a summer villa, and this cheesecake is named after it. Dense, baked, and sold barely set so it has to be kept cold.
Tochigi kept its warehouse district from the days when boats came up the river. This miso maker still works there, and grills skewers coated in its own miso in one corner.
Mashiko is a pottery town. This shop uses buckwheat grown in the same district and cuts it without wheat, so the noodles break easily and taste of the grain.
Ashikaga shumai has no meat in it — onion and potato starch, and you pour sauce over. The tea house sits in the yard of Banna-ji temple.
Tote-yaki is a thin pancake rolled around a filling, made in Shiobara. Each shop in the village rolls its own version.
The noodles are pressed out under a length of green bamboo, the maker sitting on it and using body weight. That works air into them and gives a springy bite.