8 things to eat at a yatai
From the tonkotsu ramen that built Fukuoka to the little plates you order between drinks
This is the dish most people come to a yatai for, and it tastes different eaten on a stool by the river. A white, thick pork-bone broth simmered for hours, thin straight Hakata noodles cooked for under a minute so they keep their bite, a couple of slices of chashu and fresh spring onion. When you've slurped through the noodles but the broth is still there, order a kaedama — a fresh refill of noodles — for a few hundred yen. That's the proper Hakata way.
Every good yatai has a big partitioned pot bubbling away with oden — daikon radish, boiled eggs, konnyaku, fish cakes, beef tendon and gyu-suji, all stewed for hours in a dashi broth that gets deeper as the night goes on. You point at what you want and they ladle it out piece by piece. On a cold night, paired with a hot sake or a cold beer, oden at a yatai is the most comforting thing you'll eat in Fukuoka. Order a few pieces to share while you wait for your ramen.
Half the fun of a yatai is watching the owner grill skewers an arm's length from your face. Negima (chicken and spring onion), tsukune (meatballs), crispy torikawa chicken skin, and — very Fukuoka — pork-belly and vegetable skewers too, since this region grills more than just chicken. Order tare (sweet soy glaze) or shio (salt), pick a handful, and wash them down with a draft beer. At most stalls each skewer is ¥100–200, so it's cheap to graze through several.
Some stalls run a small fryer and turn out tempura to order — prawns, squid, sweet potato, lotus root and seasonal vegetables, dropped in fresh and handed over hot and crackling. Because Fukuoka has its own fishing port, the seafood pieces are genuinely good. It's a perfect between-rounds snack: light, crisp, easy to share, and a nice contrast to the heavy tonkotsu broth. Dip it in a little salt or the tentsuyu sauce on the counter.
Hakata gyoza come out in a screaming-hot iron skillet — the whole pan, not a plate — and that's the local difference. They're smaller and thinner-skinned than Tokyo gyoza, filled with pork, ginger, garlic and finely chopped cabbage, and fried until the bottoms turn crust-crisp. Dip them in vinegar with a drop of chilli oil and you'll finish a pan before you notice. Many Tenjin yatai keep gyoza on the menu, and it's the ideal thing to order alongside a beer.
This one was born at a yatai and you can still barely find it anywhere else. Tonkotsu ramen noodles stir-fried on a screaming-hot iron griddle with minced pork, vegetables and Worcestershire sauce, finished with a splash of pork broth instead of water — so it ends up somewhere between fried noodles and ramen, smoky from the hot iron. It's said to have started at a Nagahama stall and is now most famously cooked at Kokinchan in Tenjin. If you see it on the menu, order it.
Fukuoka's signature ingredient, mentaiko (spicy pollock roe), shows up at the yatai folded into a soft rolled omelette. The egg is sweet and warm, the mentaiko salty and gently spicy, and together they're one of the easiest, most crowd-pleasing things on a stall menu. Some stalls also grill whole mentaiko on a skewer or serve it on rice. If you only try one mentaiko dish on your trip, having it here, fresh off the pan, is a lovely place to start.
A few of the larger yatai will set up a motsunabe — Fukuoka's beloved offal hot pot — right on the counter for a small group. Pork or beef offal simmered in a shoyu or miso broth with a mountain of cabbage, garlic and red chilli, the offal turning meltingly tender as it cooks. It's a warming, sharing dish best ordered with a couple of friends, and you finish it with chanpon noodles dropped into the leftover broth. Not every stall does it, so it's a treat when you find one that does.