What to eat in Shirakawa-go
6 dishes from a mountain kitchen

Be honest — coming to the Hida district and skipping Hida beef would be a waste. This is wagyu from Gifu's black-haired cattle that once took the top prize at Japan's national beef competition, with marbling so fine it melts at low temperature and turns sweet and tender the moment you bite. The village serves it every way: grilled Hida beef sushi pressed onto a small mound of rice, hot croquettes fried to order, soy-glazed skewers, and full grilled sets or steaks at sit-down restaurants. It costs noticeably less than the famous city brands because you are standing right beside where the cattle are raised.

Up in mountains where rice is hard to grow, buckwheat thrives on thin soil — which is why people here have eaten soba for centuries. Plenty of restaurants and inns still grind their own buckwheat on a stone mill in the shop, then knead and boil it fresh, so the noodles carry a buckwheat aroma far deeper than the soba you get in the city. Order it as zaru soba (cold, dipped into a soy broth) to taste the noodle at full strength, or kake soba (hot, in broth) with mountain-vegetable tempura. It hits perfectly after a morning of walking the village.

This is the Hida regional dish you will want to photograph — house-made miso mixed with spring onion, mushrooms and mountain vegetables, spread on a dried hoba (magnolia) leaf and grilled over a small charcoal burner right at your table. As the miso starts to bubble and catch a faint scorch, the smell drifts across the whole table, and locals spoon it over hot rice one mouthful at a time. Some places lay Hida beef or an egg onto the same leaf to grill alongside. The flavour is salty-sweet and rounded, the kind you never tire of — a dish born from preserving miso to eat through the snowbound months.

Iwana is the mountain charr that lives in the cold, clear streams around the village. People skewer it whole, rub it with coarse salt and plant it around the irori to grill slowly until the skin crisps and the flesh stays soft. You eat the whole thing, head to tail — the clean, mild flavour of cold-water fish carrying a light breath of charcoal smoke. Some minshuku finish it as iwana-zake, charring the bones and pouring warm sake over them until it takes on the fish's fragrance. It is a classic image of the hearthside dinner you rarely see in the city, a plain bite that tells the whole story of the streams and the valley.

The hand-held favourite sold at stalls along the main street — cooked rice pounded until half-sticky, pressed around a flat paddle into a sandal shape, brushed with a sweet-savoury miso or walnut sauce, then grilled over charcoal until the surface chars and the glaze turns glossy. Bite in and you get both the chew of the rice and the smoky scent of the miso. It is the everyday snack of the Hida–Kiso region, eaten warm as you wander the village, and only a few hundred yen a skewer. If you are here for just half a day, this is the one to grab from your very first stall.

Mountain villages are known for their stone tofu (ishi-dofu), so firm you can lift it on a straw rope without it breaking. Eat it grilled and brushed with miso (yaki-dofu) and it turns fragrant; eat it cold with soy and you get the full taste of the soybean. Alongside comes suttate, a local soup thick and nutty with nothing but ground soybeans, and to finish, seasonal mountain vegetables (sansai) — bamboo shoots, fiddleheads, wild mushrooms, pickled or fried as tempura. Together they are the plain spread that tells the story of mountain life best, found most completely at a minshuku dinner or a Hida restaurant inside a gassho house.