Start at six and finish at a river stall.
Everything below is walkable, and Hakata is the one city in Japan where dinner is a street.
18:00 Kawabata arcade — the oldest shopping street here · 18:30 motsunabe, or mizutaki · 20:00 a yatai stall on the river at Nakasu · 21:30 Hakata ramen, the last bowl of the night
Thin straight noodles in pork broth. Say “kae-dama” for a second helping of noodles in the same soup.
A hot pot of offal, garlic chives and cabbage. Ordered for two.
Chicken simmered until the broth turns white. Drink the first bowl plain.
Cured cod roe with chilli. Sold at the station in boxes to carry.
Raw mackerel with sesame. Fresh enough here to eat raw.
Fried noodles, invented at these stalls. Ask for it at a yatai.
Around a hundred stalls open at dusk and pack away before dawn. Hakata has more of them than the rest of Japan together. Ten seats, a counter, and a curtain.
The shrine the July festival floats belong to. One is kept on show all year.
Four hundred metres of covered shops, and the sweet-bean sherbet stall.
A canal running through a shopping centre, with a fountain show.
Fukuoka Airport is five minutes from Hakata Station by subway — the shortest airport-to-city ride in Japan. Shinkansen from Osaka in about two and a half hours.
A place can be better known than the prefecture it sits in. Use the prefecture pages below to work out where to eat, where to stay, how to get around and who to call.
