What is the Hakodate Morning Market?

The Hakodate Morning Market is open from 5 am to about 2 pm, but that can vary by stall / restuarant. The location is very convenient since it’s right across the street from the JR Station. This is a four block stretch in Hakodate that sells fresh seafood, vegetables, fruit, and snacks.

There’s a couple of additional, larger buildings in the area that houses more stalls and restaurants. There’s about 250 places total in this area but it never seems all that dense unlike the Tsukiji Outer Market in Tokyo. That has to do with Hakodate in general being less touristy, so there’s less people, which is quite nice actually.

The Seafood

The Steamed Crab Bun

The main draw of coming here is of course the food. Specifically the seafood and the fruit. There’s several types of crab, uni, squid, salmon eggs, scallops, other shell fish, and a whole lot more at this market. As you’d imagine, it’s all very, very good.

To start the morning off I decided to grab a steamed crab bun (450 yen, $3.06).

The dough was very light and airy. The filling is a combination of snow crab mixed with some onion and bits of carrot in some kind of sweeter sauce. It’s a little salty and sweet at same time. Crab meat taste gets a little washed out due to all the other ingredients but pretty good.

Donburi

Ikuratei

Now this was something I was looking forward to the most. Donburi is rice-bowl dish that consists of fish, meat, vegetables, or other ingredients. It’s a very popular meal throughout Japan. In the Hakodate Morning Market there are TONs of places that offer donburi with some of the freshest seafood you can find.

There’s a building on the main strip of the market that houses a bunch of restaurants. They all serve pretty much the same type of foods with the same kinds of seafood donburi, with subtle differences. The displays, like the below, showcase all the different types of donburi that restaurant makes and these line the one hallway of the building.

I ate at a couple of the places during my stay in Hakodate with the first being called Ikuratei. The menu is pretty extensive. There’s a lot of different types of donburi to choose from so it can be a tough choice sorting through all the options. It’s odd to be eating fresh fish at about 8 or 9 in the morning but you get used to it and it’s VERY good.

I went with the crab, salmon roe, and uni bowl (2800 yen, $19.03) which came with miso soup and pickled vegetables.

The crab was insanely sweet and quite salty on its own. I didn’t need to add anything or dip it into any soy sauce. It was the best tasting crab I can ever remember having.

The uni just melted in my mouth. It has that real intense seafoody taste before dissolving. Extremely creamy adn the deep sea taste was quite memorable.

The salmon roe provided a totally different texture to the bowl with that nice popping, burst of flavor with each bite.

Everything blends together so well. Drizzling some soy sauce over the bowl enchances the flavor as well. The highlight for me was the crab. I couldn’t believe how naturally sweet and salty it was!

Maruishi Shokudo

The second restaurant I went to within the market was called Maruishi Shokudo which was located in the same building as Ikuratei. The menus were very similar. The combination of what kind of seafood was on top of the donburi would be somewhat different from restaurant to restaurant.

Maruishi Shokudo stood out to me because they had a bowl that included scallops, tuna, and yellowtail (1980 yen, $13.47). I had scallops the previous night for dinner at another restaurant and they were amazing, so I wanted to double down on them for breakfast.

The scallops were tender and extremely sweet. So good!

Both the tuna and yellowtail just melted in my mouth. No chewy parts at all.

The scallops and fish were extremely fresh. Another outstanding donburi bowl. The seafood and donburi bowls are must gets when visiting the Hakodate Morning Market. Very affordable and just amazing seafood!

The Produce

Something that also warrants attention at the Hakodate Morning Market is the produce. Hokkaido is the largest agricultural area in Japan and produces many fruits and vegetables. The corn and melons are a couple of the notable products from Hokkaido so I had to try them!

At hte morning market you’ll find stalls with vendors selling individually plastic wrapped corns like the above photos. They’re about (472 yen, $2.72) a piece. It’s well worth the price. Once you unwrap the corn it’s ready to eat. It’s hands down the sweetest corn I’ve ever eaten. It tasted like cream of corn. It’s pretty insane how sweet the corn was.

Many of these same stalls and vendors will sell slices of Hokkaido cantaloupe as well (500 yen, $3.40). They’re conveniently cut up so you can use a tooth pick to pick up pieces of the slices.

This wasn’t quite as sweet as I anticipated, although this was in December, not exactly prime melon season. The melon was still super juicy , it really explodes with a great cantaloupe flavor. This one was not super sweet though. Still pretty quality. I’m sure in the summer these would be insanely good.

The last bit of produce that I got were strawberries\ (861 yen, $5.86). These were very sweet and very juicy. Super tasty. I was surprised how sweet they were since I didn’t think they’d be in season.

Perfect Place To Start Your Day

The Hakodate Morning Market is great place to kick off your day in Hakodate and grab some of the freshest seafood you can find in the country. It’s not a huge, robust market place, but that’s part of the charm. It won’t take you too long to walk through the entire Hakodate Morning Market but it might take some time to figure out what you want to eat exactly. There’s A LOT of seafood to try here and you certainly should try to fill yourself up with as much as your wallet will allow. I definitely recommend grabbing as much of the produce as you can too!