The crab and seafood you have to try
From the three signature crabs to the uni, ikura and scallops that make a Hokkaido seafood bowl unforgettable
The giant of the bunch — one king crab leg can be as long as your arm, with thick chunks of firm, meaty flesh that pull out in satisfying slabs. It's actually more closely related to hermit crabs than true crabs, so you'll count six visible legs instead of eight, but nobody cares once it hits the grill. King crab is best simply grilled over charcoal or dropped into a hot pot, where the sweet juices soak the broth. Available almost year-round but at its firmest and best in winter.
Small, brown and covered in bristly hairs — it looks the least impressive of the three, and locals will tell you it tastes the best. The legs are short, so there's less leg meat than a king crab, but what you're really here for is the body: dense sweet flesh and a deep scoop of golden crab butter (kani-miso) that crab lovers consider the prize of the whole island. Best eaten boiled and plain so nothing distracts from the sweetness. A whole hairy crab is a proper splurge.
Long, slender, elegant legs filled with delicate sweet meat — snow crab is the one to order raw as sashimi, where the flesh comes out glossy and almost translucent before melting on your tongue. It's smaller and finer than king crab, more about sweetness than bulk. Lightly boiled it's just as good, and the legs are easy to crack and eat. This is a winter crab through and through, fattest and sweetest when the seas are coldest.
The local rarity — caught mainly off the Nemuro Peninsula in far-eastern Hokkaido, so it doesn't always make it to Sapporo. Its spiky shell turns bright red when cooked (hence "flower blooming"), and the meat is rich, fatty and intensely flavoured, quite different from the cleaner sweetness of snow crab. Because the catch is small and the season short, it's pricier and harder to find — if you see fresh hanasakigani on a summer menu, grab it. It also makes a famously rich miso soup called teppo-jiru.
If you want Hokkaido's whole seafood spread in one mouthful, this is the bowl — hot or vinegared rice piled with sashimi sliced that morning. At Nijo Market many shops let you build your own, and the classic Sapporo combination is uni, ikura and crab, often with scallop, salmon and sweet shrimp added on top. Golden uni, popping red ikura, sweet crab and soft scallop in a single bite — it's the easiest, happiest way to eat your way around the island's coastline. Come in the morning when the fish is freshest.
If you think you've had uni but never tasted it fresh from a Hokkaido shell, you haven't really had it. The waters west of Sapporo — especially the Shakotan Peninsula and the Otaru coast — produce uni that's sweet, creamy and clean with none of the bitter sea-tang you sometimes get elsewhere. There are two main types: bafun uni (deep orange, rich and very sweet) and murasaki uni (pale yellow, lighter and cleaner). Order it as a uni-don (a bowl of pure sea urchin over rice) and don't blink. Peak season is summer.
Ikura in Hokkaido is different the moment you bite it — the beads are bigger, the skins thinner, and they burst with a warm rush of umami rather than a sharp salty pop. It's lightly seasoned with soy or salt, never fishy. Hokkaido is one of Japan's top ikura sources because salmon run from the Sea of Okhotsk straight into the island's rivers, so it doesn't travel far. The freshest roe shows up September–October. Order an ikura-don (a bowl topped with pure salmon roe) or pile it onto a kaisendon.
Hokkaido grows some of the biggest, sweetest scallops in Japan — plump, meaty discs that are a meal in themselves. Eat them raw as sashimi to taste the clean ocean sweetness, seared in butter and soy for a richer hit, or grilled in the shell at a market stall where the juices bubble up around the edges. They turn up on nearly every kaisendon too. Cheaper than crab and available all year, scallops are the easy win of a Hokkaido seafood run — don't skip them just because the crab is flashier.