Food Paradise Tokachi

Tokachi

Agricultural Kingdom

There’s no mistaking the immense pride Tokachi chefs have in the farm produce here.

Fertile plains, clean water, abundant sunshine and great weather, you won’t be blamed for thinking you may have arrived at some kind of a paradise. Every café, eatery or restaurant you visit, you will find delicious food made lovingly with uber-fresh ingredients. A symphony of flavours plays out inside your mouth with every bite of food you take. Is this for real? At Tokachi, this magic is a daily occurrence.

“I try my best to get all my ingredients from Tokachi,” is a common statement the chefs utter. Although the top five crops produced by Tokachi’s farmers are corn, potatoes, wheat, beetroot and beans, chefs are able to find other vegetables and fruit too. For example, there is a type of chive that tastes like garlic called gyoja ninniku. Typically, gyoja ninniku grows in mountainous areas 2,000 – 2,500 metres above sea level. However, because of the cool climate here, farmers are able to cultivate this chive in areas of lower elevation.

If you want to sample the best of Tokachi’s farm produce, a good place to visit is Tokachi Farmers Restaurant where every dish on the menu brims with the freshest vegetables and highest quality meat sourced locally.

It is at this restaurant you’ll find that Tokachi’s ingredients lend themselves extremely well to both Japanese and Western dishes. Wheat from the pizzas are harvested from Tokachi’s fields, bacon, from Tokachi’s pig farms, and even the cheese comes from the area’s very own cattle.

A fitting tribute to the hard work and passion Tokachi’s farmers put into their fields and animals, this restaurant is most certainly a stop you have to make.

(TEXT DEBORAH TAN PHOTOGRAPHY ATSUSHI TAKAHARA, YASUSHI IWAMA, IKUE WADA, MASATSUGU SUGAWARA, TOMOAKI KAWAMURA)