Sapporo

Five Sapporo counters,
and what they call what they serve

Not a ranking. Five counters arranged by what they call the food — from a house that has used Hokkaido fish and the Edo-mae word for the work since 1971, through a shop that prints rules but no price, to two shops in the same building that define Ezo-mae differently on the ground floor and the sixth.

By the Sushi Journal editorial desk · Sapporo · 15 min read ·
A snow-lined street of low buildings at night, one narrow lit doorway between them.
Susukino after dark. Two of the five counters below are in the same building here, six floors apart, and they publish different definitions of the same word.

In Ginza the question was where to look, and the answer was the shop’s own page. In Shinjuku it was which of the shop’s pages. In Shibuya it was who had written the page at all; in Roppongi, when; in Nihonbashi, who else was publishing about the same shop; in Asakusa, in what language and in what shape; in Ueno, what the name pointed to; between Ebisu and Nakameguro, where a booking landed; in Akasaka, what the printed number covered. Sapporo asks something that comes before every one of those. Not what a shop says about its prices or its hours, but what it says the food is. Three of the five counters below never use the word the other two use, and the two that use it do not mean the same thing by it.

The word is Ezo-mae. One of these five publishes a page defining it, in Japanese and in English, with a publisher credited at the foot; the shop six floors above that one publishes a different definition with its own name in front of it; and a sister counter on that same sixth floor publishes a third. The other three do not use the word once. The oldest of them, open since 1971, describes what it does as Edo-mae technique applied to Hokkaido ingredients. The next names Edo-mae as something it respects, and prints no price anywhere on its site. The last names nothing at all, and prints one figure and a page of rules. Five shops, one city, no agreement on what to call the thing all five are selling.

How this was put together

Everything below was read on 8 August 2026, from pages the shops publish themselves. No listing site, no review service and no booking platform is quoted for a fact, even where one of them carries a figure a shop leaves out; a price published by a booking service is a fact about the booking service. Because this article is about a word, the counting is mechanical: every site was searched for the characters for Ezo-mae and for Edo-mae, and the figures given below are what those searches returned. Where a shop’s own pages say different things — and three of these five do — both readings are printed in a single line, with no attempt to decide which one is current.

Nothing below is a ranking. The order is the order of the question: from the shops that use no word for what they serve, through the shop that uses one and defines it, to the shop that takes the same word and makes it its own. Where a shop publishes no price, no closing day or no cancellation term, the line is left empty rather than filled in from elsewhere. One of the five publishes no price at all, and that is recorded as a fact about the site rather than treated as a gap to be repaired.

Sushi Zen — the technique has a name, and it is not Ezo-mae

Sushi Zen opened in Susukino in 1971. Its main house is now in Maruyama, three minutes from the park station and within sight of the Hokkaido Shrine, with three counters seating twelve, eleven and seven. Search the whole of its site for Ezo-mae and nothing comes back. Search for Edo-mae and six results do, the first of them in the owner’s greeting on the front page: the wish to serve the people of Hokkaido sushi that uses Hokkaido’s ingredients and Edo-mae’s technique. The sentence directly underneath says what the shop means by the technique — curing, grilling, steaming, simmering, marinating, work that takes time — and it is the only definition of anything on the site.

That is a specific position, and it is the oldest one in this article. Ezo-mae, as the shops that use it define it further down this page, describes fish by where it was caught. Edo-mae, in the sentence Sushi Zen prints, describes what is done to fish after it is caught. On that reading the two are not rivals at all, and a shop can be entirely Hokkaido in its buying and entirely Edo-mae in its work. Sushi Zen does not argue the point. It simply never uses the other word. Its owner, Tsutomu Shimamiya, was named a Contemporary Master Craftsman by the Ministry of Health, Labour and Welfare in 2008, and the citation — long service, traditional preparation, teaching younger cooks and looking abroad — is reprinted in full on the front page along with two later decorations.

One thing about the price list is worth a line and no more. The main house’s menu page carries the Japanese courses and then, further down the same page, an English menu, and the two are not translations of each other. The Japanese list runs from ¥16,500 to ¥33,000 across four named courses. The English list has three differently named courses at 18,000, 24,000 and 30,000 yen and an omakase from 33,000. Only 24,000 appears on both. Both lists carry the same footnote: tax is inside the figure, and ten per cent service is added on top of it.

Sushi Takuma — respect for Edo, and no figure anywhere

Four minutes from Susukino station, on the ninth floor of a building on Minami 5-jo Nishi, seven seats and nothing else. The page headed with the bill of fare has two paragraphs on it. The first says the sushi at the centre of the course is made with respect for traditional Edo-mae, one piece at a time, in earnest about the ingredients. The second says the cooked dishes are borderless modern Japanese food with an essence of French about them, from an owner whose training runs across Japanese cooking, French cooking and confectionery. Hokkaido appears in neither paragraph.

So the second shop names Edo, and names it as something to respect rather than something to be. That is already a different use of the word from Sushi Zen’s, which named it as a set of operations. Neither shop is claiming to be in Tokyo. Both are using the older city as a reference point, and using it to mean two different things.

The page headed with the bill of fare carries no prices. Neither does any other page: a search of the whole domain returns no yen sign and no instance of the character for yen. What the site does carry is everything else — the seven counter seats, the six card brands and four electronic-money brands, the note that the shop is registered under the invoice system, and the line saying a cancellation on the day may be charged at the full amount. The web booking button leaves the shop’s domain for a listing service. To learn what dinner costs you have to stop reading the shop’s own writing, which is the one thing this series does not do.

Sushi Miyakawa — no school, one figure, and a page of rules

Back in Maruyama, on the ground floor of an apartment building, a site of a single page. Neither word appears on it. Neither does any other name for a style. Under the owner’s name, Masaaki Miyakawa, there is one paragraph about sparing no effort to draw the flavour out of the fish and serving the best single piece of that moment. Then the page stops describing and starts instructing.

The omakase is ¥32,000 a head, and the line directly beneath it says consumption tax and the service charge are both already inside that figure. The course takes about two hours, and guests short of time are asked to say so beforehand. A take-home futomaki is ¥7,800, tax and the box included. That is the whole menu.

Then the rules. Two seatings, at 17:00 and at 19:30. Smart casual, and specifically not beach sandals, tracksuits or shorts. No heavy perfume. No smoking outside the building either, because people live there. No car park, and please not in the neighbours’ contract spaces. No bookings through an agent. The line opens at eleven on the first trading day of the month and takes bookings to the end of the following month, and if the first falls on a closing day it moves to the next. Cancel the day before and it is half; cancel on the day and it is all of it. There is also a calendar that marks not only closed days but days on which a cancellation has just freed a seat, with an invitation to ring. A shop that declines to say what school it belongs to has written down more of what happens at its counter than anyone else here. Its one line of English points a foreign visitor at a booking service; the links at the foot point at a wine shop, at a counter with branches in Niseko and Tokyo, at another counter in Maruyama, and at a room in a Macau hotel that carries this shop’s name.

Sushiya no Saito — the word, defined, and translated

On the ground floor of a building on Minami 6-jo Nishi 4-chome, a shop that opened in 2000. Its navigation has four items and one of them is the word itself: about Ezo-mae sushi. The page under it is not a slogan. It begins with the etymology — Tokyo was once Edo and Hokkaido was once Ezo, so sushi made with fish from Tokyo Bay is called Edo-mae and sushi made with fish from Hokkaido is called Ezo-mae — and then gives a method: fish landed along the Hokkaido coast through the four seasons, cut the same day, served without unnecessary work, raw. That, it says, is the origin of the style’s other name, namazushi, raw sushi, and the shop adds that it puts one quick piece of work on the best of the local fish to bring more out of it. At the foot of the page, a credit: with the cooperation of Asahiya Publishing.

Then four pieces of that work, each with its place named. Kinki from the eastern coast, the skin left on because the fat sits under it, scored and seared, with green onion shoots, wild wasabi, sudachi and salt. Herring in the season when the fat is in it — the small bones and the Anisakis taken out by hand, which the page says is trouble, and worth it — with ginger and chives. Sujiko, which the page calls a traditional piece carried on in the sushi shops of southern Hokkaido, the salted membrane peeled and the roe broken up coarsely so that a portion comes away without crushing. Surf clam from Tomakomai, which the page notes lands more of them than anywhere in Japan, seared rather than raw because searing brings the thickness out.

All of it exists in English at a matching address, with the same publisher credited. The English page carries one sentence the Japanese does not: that Ezo-mae sushi is a unique omakase style found in Hokkaido, different from traditional Edo-mae sushi. That sentence is the shop’s, and it is the only place in this article where the two words are set side by side and told apart. Prices are printed in both languages, and two of the six figures do not match: the twelve-piece set is ¥12,100 in Japanese and 12,000 yen in English, the fourteen-piece ¥16,940 and 16,900. The ten-piece and both omakase courses agree.

Sushi made with fish from Tokyo Bay is called Edo-mae. Sushi made with fish from Hokkaido is called Ezo-mae. The only place in this article where that sentence is written down is a shop that serves it — and the page that says so credits a publisher at the foot.

Sushi Watanabe — the same word, six floors up

Take the lift in that same building to the sixth floor and the word is there again, with something in front of it. Watanabe-ryu Ezo-mae sushi: Ezo-mae sushi in the Watanabe manner. The definition underneath is not the one on the ground floor. Hokkaido fish, it says, but mainly selected ingredients from the shop’s home ground in the east of the island; the basic work of a sushi shop, of course, and also work put into the things that are not fish, Rausu kelp and miso made in the house; and no reluctance about experimental flavours in the pursuit of what makes the shop itself. The main house is in Nakashibetsu, out east, a long way from this lift.

Where the ground floor defined the word by geography, the sixth narrows it to one region, extends it past the fish and licenses invention. It also signs it. A reader who carried the ground-floor definition upstairs would find it did not describe the food. Neither shop is contradicting the other; each is doing the thing almost nobody does, which is to write down what it means. The rice gets the same treatment: a post on the site says the shop blends new-crop and old-crop Yumepirika from Hokkaido, changes the ratio four times a year with the seasons, and cooks it in a commissioned Nambu ironware hagama, with a vinegar of red and rice vinegars, coarse salt and a little sugar.

Then a third definition, on the same floor. The sister counter here, Sushi Yatsuha, publishes its address as inside Sushi Watanabe on the sixth floor, and its own site opens with the word in quotation marks followed by this: the technique of Edo-mae sushi fused with Hokkaido ingredients. Which is, almost line for line, the position Sushi Zen has held since 1971 without ever using the word. Three shops in this article publish a definition of Ezo-mae sushi. One is on the ground floor of this building and two are on the sixth, and no two of the three say the same thing. The building itself is written five different ways by its own tenants.

What the five have in common

None of this is a dispute, and none of these shops is being loose. Ezo-mae is not a certification, an association or a protected term, and nothing on any of these five sites claims that it is. It is a descriptive word, and a descriptive word with no body behind it means what the person using it says it means. What is unusual about Sapporo is how many shops take the trouble to say. Across nine districts of Tokyo we did not find one shop that stopped to define Edo-mae; the word is old enough there that nobody explains it, and the explaining is left to guides like this one. Here, three shops out of five explain, and two decline the word entirely.

The practical consequence for a visitor is small and worth having. Ezo-mae on a Sapporo signboard tells you the shop has made a decision about how to describe itself. It does not tell you the fish is local, because a shop that never uses the word may be buying the same fish. It does not tell you the work is light, because one of the shops using it ages its own kelp and makes its own miso. It does not tell you the price band, which across these five runs from a figure a shop declines to print at all to ¥32,000 with everything already inside it. The word is a claim about identity, not a specification. Where a shop has written down what it means by it — and two of these have, at length, with ports and seasons and named pieces — that page is the most informative thing on the site.

Reading a Sapporo menu in about a minute

  1. Look for the word before you look at the price. If a shop uses Ezo-mae, see whether it also has a page saying what it means by it. Two of these five do, and those pages name ports, seasons and individual pieces — more concrete information than any menu on the same site.
  2. Do not read the absence of the word as an absence of local fish. The oldest shop here has said since 1971 that it uses Hokkaido ingredients and has never once printed Ezo-mae. A shop that prints the other word, Edo-mae, is usually describing what it does to the fish rather than where the fish came from.
  3. Check that a price exists before you plan around one. One of these five publishes a full bill of fare with no figure anywhere on its domain; the number lives on a listing site instead. Two others print a single figure with the tax and the service already inside it, and say so on the same line.
  4. If a shop has an English page, look at the Japanese one as well. The two usually agree and occasionally do not: here, two of six set-menu figures differ by a few tens of yen, and one course is described with a different number of dishes in each language.
  5. Read the rules paragraph. In Sapporo it can be longer than the menu — two seatings, a dress code, no proxy bookings, a booking window that opens at eleven on the first trading day of the month, cancellation at half the day before and the whole of it on the day. All of that is published, and all of it is easier to find than the food.

Sapporo is the first city in this series outside Tokyo, Osaka and Kyoto, and it raises the question the Tokyo districts never had to. Where the local word is centuries old, nobody defines it. Where the word is younger than the shops using it, a definition is something you can go and read — on the shop’s own page, in its own words, and, in one building on Minami 6-jo Nishi 4-chome, in three versions across two floors.

If you want to book one of these

Several of the counters described above answer the telephone only in Japanese, and a few of them take bookings by no other route. AutoReserve is a Japanese reservation service with an English interface, and it states that it will place the call on a diner’s behalf where a restaurant takes reservations by telephone alone. We have not tested it against every restaurant on this page, and a listing there is not a guarantee of a seat — the doors described above are the doors either way.

Frequently asked questions

What does Ezo-mae sushi mean?

It depends which shop you ask, and three of the five here have published an answer. Sushiya no Saito derives it from the old names of the two places — Tokyo was Edo, Hokkaido was Ezo — and defines it as fish landed on the Hokkaido coast, cut the same day and served without unnecessary work. Sushi Watanabe defines its own version as mainly ingredients from eastern Hokkaido, plus work on things that are not fish, and puts the shop’s name in front of the term. Sushi Yatsuha, on the same floor as Watanabe, defines it as the technique of Edo-mae sushi fused with Hokkaido ingredients. No body certifies the word, and none of these pages claims one does.

Is Ezo-mae sushi better or worse than Edo-mae?

Nothing on these five sites makes that claim, and this article does not either. On the definitions the shops themselves publish, the two words are not answering the same question. Ezo-mae describes where the fish is from. Edo-mae, in the sentence Sushi Zen prints, describes what is done to the fish — curing, grilling, steaming, simmering, marinating. A shop can be both, and Sushi Yatsuha’s definition of Ezo-mae is precisely that combination.

Do all Sapporo sushi restaurants use Hokkaido fish?

Only the shops’ own pages are used here, and three of these five do not describe their buying at all. Two do, at length: Sushiya no Saito names eastern Hokkaido for its kinki and Tomakomai for its surf clam, and Sushi Watanabe names eastern Hokkaido, Rausu kelp and Hokkaido-grown Yumepirika rice. The other three publish no sourcing information, which is a fact about their pages and not about their fish.

Which of these five is the cheapest?

On published figures: Sushiya no Saito from ¥9,680 for ten pieces, tax and service in; Sushi Zen ¥8,800 at lunch and from ¥16,500 at dinner, with ten per cent service added on top; Sushi Watanabe ¥25,300, tax and service in; Sushi Miyakawa ¥32,000, tax and service in; Sushi Takuma publishes nothing. That is a comparison of what is printed, not of what an evening costs, and the courses are not the same size as each other.

Can these shops be booked in English?

Sushiya no Saito has a full English site with prices, and names a booking system and a listing service itself. Sushi Zen has an English booking form on a separate domain. Sushi Miyakawa has a single English line pointing at a booking service. Sushi Watanabe’s English, Chinese and Korean link leads to a third-party site rather than to anything the shop wrote. Sushi Takuma has no English at all.

Sapporo Edomae Choosing Areas
編集部
Sushi Journal Editorial Desk / 鮨ジャーナル編集部

Sushi Journal is an English-language publication on the craft, culture and vocabulary of sushi, written and edited in Tokyo from primary Japanese sources — government and market data, and the standard trade literature.

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