It is about 22 minutes by car from Naha Airport. It is a cafeteria located in Yorimiya, Naha City. Since Okinawa University is nearby, many students come to this cheap and hearty diner. The restaurant offers all-you-can-drink iced tea! The food is ticketed and numbered, so ordering is easy.
Point 1: A little hard to get to? What is the location of Hacchan Shokudo?
Hachan Shokudo is located in Yorimiya, in the eastern part of Naha City.
It is a 25-minute walk from Kokusai-dori Street and Shikina-en, Naha’s famous garden. It is a 10-minute drive from Shikinaen, an area not often visited by tourists.
It is located right in front of the bus stop (in front of the Naha Bus Maywashi Branch Office), so it is easy to access by bus.
Located in a residential area near the University of Okinawa, Hachan Shokudo attracts a wide variety of customers, including students, businessmen, workers, and housewives in the neighborhood with their children, all looking for a cheap and hearty meal.
This is a restaurant loved by the locals and rarely visited by tourists.
To order, you must first buy a meal ticket, but since the menu items are numbered, ordering is easy. The system is such that you are called when your order is ready.
Point 2: Sukiyaki is the first choice? What kind of menu does “Hacchan Shokudo” have?
Hachan Shokudo” has a variety of menu items.
Without prior knowledge, you will have a hard time deciding which menu item to choose. You first buy a meal ticket from the ticket machine, but if you are not careful, there will be a line of locals behind you at lunchtime, so be careful.
As is typical of an Okinawan diner, there are not only Okinawan dishes such as chanpuru, yushi tofu, and Okinawan soba, but also curry, katsu-don (pork cutlet on rice), katsu pilaf, fried rice, and Neapolitan.
Of course, set meals are also available, and the choice of white rice or brown rice is a healthy one!
But if you are a tourist, you may want to try a little Okinawan food.
In that case, we recommend the sukiyaki (900 yen). It is served in an iron pot, so be careful that it is taiko-ko (Okinawan dialect meaning “hot”).
In mainland Japan, sukiyaki is prepared in different ways in the Kanto and Kansai regions, but it is usually made by boiling beef and vegetables in a sweet and spicy sauce and dipping them in a beaten raw egg.
Okinawan “sukiyaki” consists of beef, cabbage, lettuce, onion, bean-starch vermicelli, tofu, and raw egg (the ingredients may vary slightly from restaurant to restaurant). It has a sweet and spicy flavor, but it is surprisingly light because of the abundant flavor of the vegetables.
And since it is usually served with a spoon, it may be “treated as Western food” in Okinawa.
Some restaurants have butter (margarine) on the seats, so some people put a small amount of it in the bowl. In this restaurant, it is placed in the seating area, but some restaurants offer a choice of butter or raw egg. It is very hard for tourists to choose butter!
This way, a mild sweetness is added to the soup and it becomes a forbidden delicacy!
In addition, some restaurants serve it with Tabasco on the side. The customization of the Sukiyaki flavor in Okinawa is very deep.
At Hachan Shokudo, eggs come by default, so if you don’t have butter or Tabasco, by all means, request them.
Point 3: “Hachan Shokudo” offers all-you-can-drink iced tea!
Not only at Hacchan Shokudo but in Okinawa, where it is hot all year round, cold drinks are sometimes the best treat of all.
At Hacchan Shokudo, iced tea is served in a tank along with water and tea, and you can drink as much as you like by turning on a self-serve cock.
It is very nice to know that iced tea is free of charge, which is quite expensive if you order it at a regular café!
Please try the fascinating “Hachan Shokudo” with free iced tea and a wide variety of dishes.
