It seemed to me on a recent winter's visit to Sapporo that everyone was a performer: from the flamboyant gestures and bullhorn announcements of the tour guides, to the showy dismembering of crabs by vendors, to the owners of the cubbyhole restaurants in Ramen Yokocho, the alley of mostly one-man operations to which we repaired on our first night in the capital of Hokkaido to sample its trademark pork noodles in a thick miso broth.
In our chosen niche, the master tossed, sprinkled and doused his ingredients with the rehearsed precision of someone who knows he is being carefully watched by a hungry audience.
Although the Sapporo table includes local specialties such as Ishikari nabe (salmon stew), jingiskān (Genghis Khan, a Mongolian-style lamb barbecue) and a seafood concoction called dosanko nabe, most travelers will be drawn back to its signature noodles, with some variations coopting ingredients as surprising as cheese, butter, milk, asparagus and corn.