Sapporo on foot from the Sapporo Prince Hotel: the 14 places we drank and ate at
We stayed at the Sapporo Prince Hotel twice in 2026 — five nights in April, five more in June — and both times for the same backwards reason: it has no executive lounge.
A lounge is usually where our evening ends: drinks upstairs, light food, a window, no reason to put shoes back on. The point of Sapporo was to find out what was near the front door, and a lounge would have cancelled that at five o’clock every day.
So the days had a shape. Breakfast at the ground-floor buffet, included in the room, which has its own article. An afternoon walk through the Tanukikoji arcade, nominally exercise, actually scouting that night’s place. The hot spring bath at the hotel, ¥1,000 a head, paid daily because the room’s unit bath is not somewhere you linger. Then out on foot: one place, usually two, three at most.
Twelve days of that came to ¥135,024 (about $900, at ¥150 to the dollar, the rate we use here) of food and drink for two — ¥11,252 (about $75) a day, breakfast not included. Three of the twelve days were ¥0, spent in an airport lounge and an aircraft seat.
The fourteen places, with what we were charged on the date given. Prices move.
Craft beer
Tap Room BEER KOTAN Sapporo Odori (Minami 2 Nishi 3, 3F). The tap room of Hop Kotan (Hoppu Kotan Brewing), a brewery in Kamifurano, the only town in Hokkaido growing hops commercially (brewery site, July 2026). Monday to Thursday, 17:00–19:00, a 630ml mug plus one dish is ¥2,000; the mug is heavy enough that clinking it was work. Later, a haskap fruit ale and BEER KOTAN IPA at ¥850 a large, and fish and chips made with a seasonal Hokkaido fish we guessed was cherry salmon, ¥1,280. ¥8,360, 21 April 2026.
THE CRAFT (Minami 4 Nishi 4, Susukino). Thirty-three taps, about 80% of them Hokkaido breweries (shop site, July 2026). The three-beer tasting set is 150ml each for ¥1,300; we ordered it three times and drank nine. The Ikeda beef hamburg, ¥1,960, arrived nearly raw after we asked for well done. ¥9,490, 23 April 2026. Nine small glasses is a lot of tasting and not much drinking. The full evening.
Beer Bar North Island (Minami 2 Nishi 4, 10F). Run by a Hokkaido brewery founded in 2002 by two brewers who trained in Canada. Twelve beers on our night, four of them IPAs still on. A large is 430ml from ¥1,080, a small 275ml at ¥880, which settles the question. Garlic-pickled nagaimo, ¥500. ¥5,740, 14 June 2026 — the food ran to roughly half of what it cost us at THE CRAFT. Longer version.
Mugishu Club PALS (Minami 3 Nishi 7, 3F of the M’s Building). The one place here we went back to: 21 April, 16 June and 18 June 2026. No fixed lineup: kegs are replaced as they empty, so the IPAs had changed in the two days between our June visits. A craft beer bar with a Chinese kitchen, and the kitchen is what keeps us coming: egg fried rice, ¥820 in April and ¥850 in June, ordered twice. Four large gyoza, ¥750. Bills of ¥7,340, ¥4,640 and ¥5,560.
Izakaya and sake
Uchoten (ground floor of the same M’s Building). A taishu-sakaba, a plain everyday drinking house, whose door we had walked past many times. Sake first, while we could still taste it: Eiko Fuji Ibuki junmai daiginjo, one go, ¥1,900. Raw toro-saba, sashimi and seared, ¥1,880. Then the omu-katsu, ¥1,200 — a fried cutlet under a soft omelette with sauce, mayonnaise and katsuobushi, which lands close to okonomiyaki. My wife called it an invention. ¥8,218, 24 April 2026. The full night.
Izakaya Chiba (Minami 2 Nishi 6). Two hours of all-you-can-drink for ¥2,500 (about $17), off a list of 55 regional sake. Singles are ¥590 for 100ml, so glass five pays for the plan; we drank ten. Two catches: last order lands at 90 minutes, not 120, and once the room fills, food can take an hour — order it all at the start. Aji fry, breaded but raw inside, with shiba-zuke tartare ¥880, hon-maguro torotaku ¥990. ¥9,770, 18 June 2026, on our third attempt. The plan and the catch.
Yakitori S (Minami 2 Nishi 10). One man grills alone and hands each skewer over as it comes off the fire, so nothing is lukewarm. Most skewers are ¥280 to ¥380, with wings at ¥550 for two: thigh, bonjiri, heart, gizzard, and Muroran-style yakitori, which is pork. We had eleven, plus nagaimo pickled with shiso, ¥440. Pickles are the second speciality; the seven-piece platter, ¥980, we never got to. The bill is one handwritten number: ¥10,600, 16 June 2026. Skewer by skewer.
Oysters and fish beside the coals
Kakigoya Lungo Carnival (Tanukikoji 4-chome). An oyster shack with banners for raw oysters at ¥100 each and a kilo of gangan-mushi — steamed oysters — at ¥1,100 (about $7.30). We read that price as a warning about size and walked past it for a while. Wrong: a kilo is four or five each, and they are large. Scallop kushikatsu, ¥350. ¥3,971, 23 April 2026. The night we went in.
Lungo Carnival honten. The main branch of the same brand, built around genshiyaki: whole fish skewered and stood around a basket of charcoal rather than over it. Mackerel with herbs, ¥990 — one of us would rather have had it plain and salt-grilled, the other liked the rosemary. Buri kama, ¥715. The same steamed oysters, ¥1,210 a kilo. Two glasses of sake, ¥660 and ¥880. ¥7,865, 15 June 2026. Full write-up.
Wine
PINOT (Minami 2 Nishi 10). A wine shop with a bar in the same room, on a street we walked most days; the owner moved here from Susukino in June 2024 (local coverage, checked July 2026). We walked in on a supplier’s tasting — the shop’s site lists tastings on two Saturdays a month (checked July 2026), and ours happened on a Friday — and drank everything but the ¥3,000 glass: a sparkling, three whites, a rosé, two reds. Cheese and jamon serrano, ¥1,900. ¥10,700, 24 April 2026. How we stumbled in.
moi (Minami 2 Nishi 7, 2F). Nothing outside but an “open” card on the door handle; opening it took nerve. A small counter, and a young owner who, asked for a recommendation, asked back what we liked. Bordeaux by the glass ¥750, the daily recommendations from ¥1,000; when we half-joked about the price she said nothing goes much over ¥2,000. Truffle-flavoured fries, ¥700. Cash only, the one thing that makes us hesitate. ¥6,900, 15 June 2026. It appears to be a one-year pop-up, so check before planning around it.
Sit-down dinners
Orizzonte (Minami 2 Nishi 5). An Italian with a wood oven; the manager greeted us so cheerfully from the doorway on our afternoon walk that the evening decided itself. Four-plate Hokkaido seafood antipasto ¥3,500. Half-and-half pizza, margherita and pig’s trotter with spring onion — the collagen pizza — ¥1,880 plus a ¥220 halving fee. Wagyu rump tagliata ¥3,500. The crust comes out thin and crisp, not the Neapolitan dough we had pictured. ¥18,400 (about $123), 22 April 2026 — an anniversary-sized bill by our standards. Plate by plate.
Nepalica (Minami 1 Nishi 11, 2F). Close enough that we walked past it on the way to almost everything else. The Wednesday-and-Saturday dinner set is ¥7,980 (about $53) for two: spiced nuts, salad, stir-fried seseri, momo, hot chai, and a clay-pot biryani finished at your table on a gas ring, eight minutes on a low flame and three to rest. The red wine arrives cold, in the ice bucket you would expect a white in. Coriander runs right through the biryani; we both got through it, though by the last servings, gone cool, the smell had come back. ¥14,800, 17 June 2026. Course by course.
The one we would not repeat
SAPPORO Gyoza Seizosho, Tanukikoji branch (Minami 2 Nishi 5). Four large gyoza ¥990, one tare zangi and one shio zangi at ¥300 each. The gyoza were not hot when they reached us and the filling ran to vegetables; the zangi were big and perfectly fine. “Probably not going back,” we agreed. ¥2,670, 23 April 2026, the third stop of that evening.
Would we do it this way again
We already did: June was the same hotel and the same square kilometre. It began as a list of April’s unfinished business — the izakaya that was full, the oysters we wanted another go at — and filled up with places we had walked past in April without registering.
The rhythm held across the twelve days: one place a night, often two, three at the most. The oyster shack is the one we promised each other we would come back to; PALS we go to every time without discussing it.
Practical bits
- Two stays at the Sapporo Prince Hotel: 20–25 April 2026 and 14–19 June 2026, five nights each.
- Cash or card: moi is cash only. We paid by card at Beer Bar North Island, PALS, Lungo Carnival honten, Izakaya Chiba and Nepalica. The rest we did not record.
- Tax: menu prices were before tax at the oyster shack, tax-included at Yakitori S; at Izakaya Chiba the drink plan is tax-included and the food is not.
- Otoshi — the small dish you did not order and pay for anyway — turned up at six of the fourteen; at five of them we know what it cost, ¥330 to ¥550 a head.
- Without a reservation: Izakaya Chiba turned us away in April, Uchoten gave us the counter with a 19:00 limit, and the oyster shack had two seats free in a full room.
- Closed days: Izakaya Chiba’s listings say closed Mondays (July 2026), and we lost an evening to that; the menu cover at Yakitori S said closed Sundays (June 2026); the Nepalica biryani set is Wednesday and Saturday dinners only.
- English menus, smoking rules, how many tourists: we didn’t check.
- Still unfinished: the giant Rausu hokke at Lungo Carnival honten, and the potato fries at North Island.
The line we remember from that night came from the table behind us at the oyster shack, from somebody who had presumably also walked past that banner: “I underestimated oysters. I could do this forever.” That table ordered a second kilo. We were on stop two of three; if we had not been, we would have done the same. Next time, we told each other, maybe two kilos between us.
Facts checked 2026-08-19. Prices, hours and menus are what we saw on our visit; they change. Nothing here was sponsored or comped.