Sapporo is the northern capital, the largest city on Hokkaido, and for three months of the year one of the coldest places in Japan that still functions. Its ramen was written by that cold. The bowl is heavy, the soup is miso, and the toppings are the produce of the island around it, butter and sweet corn from the dairy country, bean sprouts and stir-fried vegetables piled high enough to insulate. In a Sapporo winter, ramen is not lunch. It is architecture.
The shop that turned miso into a style
Miso ramen is young even by ramen standards. The credit for the first bowl goes to a Sapporo shop in the 1960s, where a cook stirred miso paste into a rich pork soup as an experiment, and the city took to it the way cold cities take to calories. The style spread nationwide in the 1970s as part of the miso boom, when the toppings codified into the set the style is known by, a ladle of aromatic oil sealing the surface, corn and butter riding the top, noodles thick and curly to stand up to a soup with that much weight. The north-south article in this series describes the split, Sapporo's answer to a blizzard against Hakata's answer to a dock shift. Same country, opposite physics.
The alleys
Sapporo eats its ramen in yokocho, narrow alleys of tiny shops packed together, doors steaming, ten seats a piece, each room arguing its soup to anyone who sits down. The Ramen Yokocho near Susukino, the entertainment district, is the famous one, rebuilt after fires and still the address the guidebooks send people to, and the experience of it is the point, walk the lane, read the steam, pick a door, and eat beside strangers while the snow does its worst outside. The shops that left the alley and carried Sapporo miso to the world are the ones that kept the alley's standards: a soup that could warm a person from the inside and the portions to prove it.
The neighbour with the clear soup
Hokkaido's other contribution, worth a paragraph in any honest piece, is Asahikawa, the island's second city, where the shoyu soup runs a double stock of chicken and seafood under a thin lid of oil that holds the heat in the sub-zero street. Between Asahikawa's clarity and Sapporo's weight, the island covers both halves of the ramen argument, and the winter visitors who eat their way across it conclude the argument was unnecessary.
Here, at the equator
Singapore has no snow, but the Miso Ramen on our menu holds its northern citizenship, miso tare over the southern pork bone base, a hybrid the city eats all year with the air conditioning as its winter. The full account of how the two schools split sits in the north-south piece, and the menu at 3 Pickering Street holds both ends of the argument, miso from the snow, tonkotsu from the port, and the chilli ladder standing over the whole map.
Butter, corn and the dairy island
The topping set that reads as eccentric elsewhere is local produce logic in Sapporo. Hokkaido is Japan's dairy country, settled in the Meiji era with an agricultural college at its centre and a government that wanted a northern breadbasket, and the island's butter, milk and cheese became national staples out of that project. Sweet corn grows in the same fields. The miso bowl that wears both is the island's pantry worn on its sleeve, fat and sugar against the cold, the same reason the northern stock runs heavy, and the combination sounds strange for exactly one bite. After that it is climate, edible.