After Tokyo, we made our way north to Hokkaido with our first stop in Hakodate. We stayed there for two nights, but only ate at one spot – Yasai Bar Miruya. There are not loads of vegan options in Hakodate, and there is very little activity on Happy Cow, which made it a bit difficult to find places that would be reliably open, or reliably vegan. This place is all vegan, so we were very happy and visited twice. I contacted them on Facebook (in English) in advance to book a table, just to make sure we got some guaranteed good food.

The restaurant looks extremely unassuming. There’s not a sign outside and the windows are frosted, so you wouldn’t know it’s a restaurant at all. You just have to be bold and go in! The servers didn’t speak much English and we speak no Japanese, but there’s an English menu and with some translation apps on the go everything went very smoothly. Over our two nights, we tried four different dishes on the menu, leaving just a couple more that we didn’t get to try. All our dishes came with rice, salad, pickles, mashed potato, and a slice of deep fried konjac, which meant that the meals were suitably filling.

The fried meat set was good. The meat was like karaage, but not as good as the chicken we had in Tokyo in either texture or taste.

The curry set was fantastic. The sauce was extremely flavoursome, but the carrots and mock meat within the curry were a little too soft, unfortunately. We hadn’t had any curry dishes already on the trip at this point, so maybe this one is partly boosted by not having an easy point of comparison, but it was the best of the four dishes we tried.

The gyoza set was good, the gyoza were quite generously filled and tasty. They were not in the same league as the gyoza restaurant in Tokyo, but that’s to be expected.

The teriyaki meat set was really tasty, though again the texture of the mock meat wasn’t as good as what we’d had back in Tokyo. But high marks for flavour! All in all, we considered this place to be a really welcome spot for vegan food in a city with limited options. The dishes were hearty and decent, but not mind-blowing. And that’s fine, sometimes you just need to get the job done!

Activities in Hakodate

We were mostly staying in Hakodate to break up a longer journey to Sapporo (which is a whopping eight hours on the train from Tokyo). While there are things to do in Hakodate, we didn’t do any of them besides paddle in the sea.

We used Hakodate as a base to visit Onuma Quasi National Park. Yes, it’s not a proper national park, but it was good enough for us! I recommend it for a day trip, it had a nice easy trail around the lake which took us across lots of bridges and opened up some good view points. We had our binoculars with us for some bird spotting, and enjoyed some good ducks and a black kite plucking a fish from the lake! It’s not vegan, but it was a majestic sight!