Noodles ── Ramen
Hakodate Ramen
clear salt broth, among the oldest ramen styles in Japan
A clear salt broth with thin, straight noodles. It grew in a port city exposed early to food culture from abroad.
- Origin: Hokkaido Hakodate
- Shio — salt
- About 680 km north of Tokyo
What it's made of
The clear salt broth carries no heaviness, and the transparency of gently simmered pork bone shows straight through in the bowl. Soft, medium-thin straight noodles carry plain toppings — chashu, bamboo shoots, scallion, spinach, wheat gluten. Alongside Sapporo's miso and Asahikawa's soy, it forms one corner of Hokkaido's three great ramen styles, yet stands out among Japan's regional ramen as one of the very lightest.
How it's made
Chinese-style noodle soups are built on a salted broth by default, without soy tare or a Japanese-style dashi of kelp and bonito. Hakodate ramen is said to have carried that template forward almost unchanged, pairing a clear broth of gently simmered pork and chicken bone with a salt tare and straight noodles. Around 150 ramen shops still operate in the city today, keeping that clear salt style alive.
Why it took this shape
One story holds that after the port opened in 1854, Chinese cooks established restaurants in Hakodate early on, and an 1884 newspaper ad already shows "Nankin soba" for sale — reportedly ahead of similar shops in Tokyo or Kobe, making this one of the first places in Japan to eat something like ramen at all. Never drifting from salt into soy or dashi reads as a sign of how closely this port town held on to the Chinese noodle soup it inherited.
Before you go
- How to read a ticket machineShops that use a ticket machine (shokken-ki) often place their most popular items in a similar spot.
- Cash-only shops are commonEspecially at ramen shops, it's common to find places that only accept cash — often through a ticket machine.
- Foods to look for in summerA guide to foods often seen in Japan around summer — eel on the Day of the Ox, hiyashi chuka, somen, shaved ice, edamame with beer, and hamo — with rough pointers for finding them.
Dishes in the same style
Ingredients and dishes from this land
Contrast
- Hiroshima RamenA pork-bone base rounded out with soy sauce and vegetables for a softer finish.
- Hakata RamenA cloudy broth from hard-boiled pork bones with very thin, straight noodles. Diners can order kaedama, an extra portion of noodles alone.
- Sapporo RamenMiso broth combined with stir-fried vegetables and capped with lard to hold the heat. Medium-thick wavy noodles carry the soup.
- Aizu Yamajio RamenSalt ramen seasoned with mountain salt drawn from hot-spring water — rounder than sea salt.
Also from Hokkaido
- Asahikawa RamenSoy-sauce broth built on seafood and pork bones, topped with lard so it stays hot. A response to the region's severe winters.
- Asahikawa HorumenA local dish that crosses Asahikawa's two soul foods — soy-sauce ramen and grilled pork offal. Pork offal, cleaned and prepped to remove its odor, sits on a soy-based broth. It was devised in Asahikawa in the 2010s.
- Gatatan RamenAshibetsu's local dish gatatan, turned into ramen: a salt broth thickened with potato starch, loaded with vegetables, meat and seafood, and finished with a stream of beaten egg.
- Bibai no TorimeshiChicken and onion are cooked into rice with soy sauce, sugar, and sake — said to trace back to a Meiji-era landowner in Bibai's Nakamura district who had tenant farmers raise chickens, then served them to guests.
- Bibai YakitoriOne skewer carries the whole bird — offal, skin and all.
- Biratori WagyuJapanese Black raised in Biratori, Hidaka, founded on breeding cattle brought from Shimane in 1962 — finished slowly through harsh winters, said to give the meat a notably deep flavor.