A detailed account of my room service meals at the hot spring hotel in October 2025 with descriptions of the food, the decor, the service, and the price.

Bed, Bath, and a Banging Good Time

In October of 2025, I spent a week in Hokkaido with the missus. The last leg of the journey took us to Noboribetsu, a small onsen town with a long history of providing visitors with mineral-rich water from the surrounding volcanic hot springs.

The town is centered around a main street with a few shops selling memorabilia, a pharmacy, two convenience stores, and a dozen or so restaurants. Past the main road is Hell’s Valley, named for the bubbling water throwing off sulphurous fumes that permeate the whole region. There are a couple of well-marked and well-paved trails that go around the surrounding hills in a circuit, and are easily completed in 2-3 hours.

A visit to Noboribetsu is feasible as a day trip from Sapporo. It’s an hour’s drive away, and for those without a car it’s easy to reach with frequent JR trains and a bus that takes you from the station to the hot spring area. The entire area is pleasantly walkable.

But you’ll have a much better experience if you stay the night in one of the onsen ryokan that fill the surrounding streets. These hotels operate hot spring baths for anyone passing by (for a fee, of course). But guests that stay the night can enjoy the baths at leisure after spending the day exploring the surrounding area, which is exactly what we did.

The Hotel

In contrast to the elegant wood panelled entrance that is shown on booking websites, the rest of Oyado Kiyomizuya is painted an unassuming drab olive green. A valet parked our car and brought our luggage in. All guests must also check their shoes in at the front desk, and use the provided slippers within the hotel’s grounds.

Our entire stay at Kiyomizuya cost about $300USD. That included a nice room for the night, unlimited use of the onsen hot spring (except for a brief cleaning period), as well as dinner and breakfast.

Our room was a suite with mixed Japanese and Western fixtures. The dining room was floored with bamboo tatami mats, on which we sat to eat at a low table. There was also a bedroom with Western style beds, in contrast to some of the other rooms where guests sleep on mattresses laid on the bamboo floor according to Japanese custom.

The hot spring bath area is on the ground floor, past the reception. It has an indoor pool and an outdoor bath that’s decorated as a rock garden – one bath is designated for ladies and the other for men, with a changeover after the evening cleaning so that guests can enjoy both sides.

The Service

Hospitality and service is strongly ingrained in Japanese culture, and that’s reflected strongly in how we were treated by the staff. The staff at the front desk remembered us, and made us feel welcome. Our shoes were stowed away safely, and brought out to us whenever we went out for sightseeing or to make a run to the convenience store.

For dinner, we were served by an elegant middle aged lady dressed in a kimono. She moved with grace and dignity, and impeccable manners. The way she knelt down and set the table was clearly well-rehearsed, with everything (even the chopsticks) having their own place.

However, there is a strong language barrier. I wrote about how my experience at the two Michelin star Kwonsooksoo in Seoul was hampered by not being able to understand what’s going on with the food.

This was even more so at Kiyomizuya. We got several phrases in English coupled with gestures, but otherwise the staff spoke almost entirely in Japanese. I tried to feed the food introductions delivered in rapid fire Japanese into a translation app but it didn’t work well.

I got the impression that the staff is well aware that you can’t understand Japanese. But to deliver the script in the Japanese language is included in the art form of the meal, as much a part of the dinner as the food. Like this was the way things were always done, and they are here to give you the same experience that everyone else before you have gotten.

Although there is more of a language barrier than at Kwonsooksoo, it was less of a problem for me here because I am more familiar with Japanese food than Korean food. With some Google-fu, we were able to largely reverse engineer what was going on in the menu.

One additional point is that the food was all brought to our room at once, after which the staff retreated to let us eat in private. That set this meal apart from a restaurant that would serve every course one after the other. The privacy was nice, but it does mean that the food was often cold by the time we got to them – although a lot of the food was perfect tasty at room temperature (like the sashimi), or were kept warm by burners.

The Food

Both meals were served in our rooms at designated times which you would work out with the reception when you check in. Because we wanted to spend the afternoon exploring the nearby area, we chose to have dinner served at 6pm instead of 5:30.

We had a menu we could refer to, printed on beautiful paper and autumn leaf motifs that echoed the season. Google Translate was a wash though, so I’ll just go through the food in the order that I ate them and try my best to piece together what went into each dish.

Dinner

Everything was brought in on two massive trays and laid out on the table in an impressive display. The meal was paired with a small cup of dry sake, which I found to be a good choice – a sweet sake would not have been as complimentary to the predominantly savoury food.

After ooh-ing and ahh-ing, and taking a ton of pictures, we started off with the sesame tofu. It tastes like asian sesame salad dressing but in the form of a solid jelly, with a sweet yellow sauce to balance out the tartness and savouriness.

15 minutes have passed by this point, which was when we were instructed to start enjoying the black pork and scallop hotpot. The vegetable mix consisted of the usual suspects: daikon radish, napa cabbage, enoki mushrooms, Japanese leeks and onions, and fish cakes.

The most remarkable element of this hotpot, and of this meal, were the several thin slices of pork. There was a slightly cheesy taste to the fat, kind of like you would get with dry aged beef. I do not know if this was because the meat came from a special breed of pig, or if this was also aged in some way. The cheesy smell permeated the rest of the dashi-based broth and flavoured the vegetables with it too.

Next came the soup served in a teapot, set atop a small stove that kept it warm. It was a dashi broth fortified with seafood, as well as umami from wakame seaweed, as well as shimeji and shiitake mushrooms. There’s a slight acidity to it, as well as a hint of bitterness. Sipping this from teacups was a novel experience, and it made me think of British beef tea.

This little bowl had a couple of small surprises. That circular wheel thing is some sort of roll with mackerel flesh, and the yellow bits were some sort of pickle that gave it a lot of crunch. The shimeji mushroom was also pickled with a dashi based broth, which gave it a punchy acidity. But most impressive was the piece of cucumber, which looks like a stack of thin slices but is actually still in one piece – a lot of small cuts that open up a lot of surface area for the cucumber to hold on to the pickling vinegar.

The grilled fish might look simple, but there’s thought put here too. It’s completely deboned, and the thinner flap of belly was folded over to even out the thickness to help the entire piece reach uniform doneness. It’s grilled with a sweet glaze, and came with a stock of pickled ginger for some sour and spicy cleanser that broke up the monotony of eating a big hunk of fish.

Next were an assortment of pickles. These were all curious because unlike any pickles I have had before, there was almost no acidity. The cucumbers were salt-forward, the onions mostly sweet, and the unidentified red vegetable had a definite fermented funk but was not sour at all. I suspect that they were all lightly and briefly pickled, which preserved the snap and the crunch of the vegetables and made this course a pleasant one.

I enjoyed the pickles in between bites of the rice, which was itself flavoured. The colour suggested that it was cooked in some sort of broth, and there were pieces of krill and tofu and lotus root in there along with some familiar dried scallops. The rice also went well with the miso soup, which was a bit more tart than I expected. Checking the menu, that’s because it’s made with red miso, which I haven’t had before.

I imagine that this section of the meal is what a typical day-to-day dinner would look like for the average Japanese person before the county industrialised, especially for someone who was less well off. A small reminder that made me pause and reflect on how much easier our modern globalised lives are compared to how previous generations lived.

The sashimi selection covered a spectrum of textures. The squid was firm and bouncy, while the white fish had a snappy skin over soft and almost melting flesh. Both of these had a sweet aftertaste that gave me the feeling that they were very fresh. The tuna had a characteristic slight metallic taste, and the texture was even more impressive. It’s so tender there’s no need to chew, I just pushed it with my tongue against the roof of my mouth and it broke apart. This was one of the highlights of the meal.

I called this plate the Quattro because there are four dishes, but seldom had more than one element. There was some okra in a sweet and savoury sauce. shiso gives it a bit of peppery bite, some pleasantly grassy vegetables stewed with octopus, and a terrine of fish in a sweet and savoury soy-dashi jelly.

The busiest plate in the Quattro was itself a Trio. There was a piece of stewed sardine that was sweet and slightly alcoholic (I would guess it’s from mirin). Then there was a fried meat patty that was battered with toasted rice instead of breadcrumbs, which gave it an interesting nutty taste.

Last but not least, there was a piece of sweet potato that was boiled in honey which was ridiculously good for something so simple, just bursting at the seams with floral honey. Honestly, this might be the most impressive part of the meal.

The name for this dish was lost in translation. Our phone thinks it’s “Marinated Gibbon”, but in fact it was a ball of taro purée that was somehow sweetened. Judging from the colour, I would guess there’s some pumpkin in there. There was a mild starchy taste and a nice chewy texture, but while it’s a novel experience it wasn’t something to write home about.

Dessert was a small milk pudding with a yogurt-y, almost cheesy aftertaste that makes me think it was made with milk with a high butterfat content. The berry sauce was probably made with crushed whole berries, and there was some crunch from the seeds left in there. I also appreciated how the texture of the sauce was relatively thin, and neither very sour or sweet. I usually find that sauces overpower the main character, but this was a rare case of the sauce actually complementing and adding to the experience.

Breakfast

We were given the choice of 0730 or 0800 for the breakfast service. We wanted to sneak in a morning onsen session beforehand, so we chose to have breakfast at 8. That still left plenty of time to pack and check out by 10. Our server for breakfast was a younger lady, maybe in her late 20s. Like with dinner, all the food was brought in and our table was set in one go.

In doing so, she took away the teapot that I had been running a “cold brew” experiment on – the hotel provided some very nice green tea leaves, and I wanted to see if tea made by steeping the leaves in room temperature overnight would taste differently from tea brewed with hot water.

I gently protested to the teapot being taken, to which she replied, “new tea!”. Indeed, we were served black tea with breakfast rather than green tea. As to the reason behind this arrangement, your guess is as good as mine.

The breakfast spread was not as extensive as dinner, but impressive nonetheless. Besides the rice and protein, there were plenty of interesting pickles and other supporting characters. Along with salad, soup and dessert, this breakfast brought together a wide range of colours, textures, and temperatures.

The salmon was well salted inside and out, probably seasoned well in advance. Next to it was a sweet rolled omelette (a tamagoyaki). There’s a substantial amount of protein here that, together with the rice, kept me going through a long morning.

It was satisfying to enjoy the fluffy rice with sips of miso soup (white miso this time), as well as the various pickles – burdock root, radishes, mustard greens, and a piece of ume (Japanese plum – makes a very tasty liqueur) that was so tart that my cheeks puckered involuntarily.

What was even more interesting, and my favourite part of the breakfast, was what I called the Savoury Trio. A dab of boozy wasabi mayo, a sweet and sour green seaweed salad, and a piece of pink mentaiko – salted cod roe with an intense concentrated umami and dried fish taste, like if caviar was cured.

Then there were the soupy saucy dishes. A Chawanmushi-looking thing that turned out to be tofu with a ginger-forward sauce, as well as a ball of tofu and fish flesh hiding a single edamame bean within that’s sitting in a dashi broth that’s been sweetened by simmering pumpkin in it.

Still, some parts of the breakfast was relatively mundane. The potato salad was nothing to write home about, but it was a nice way to get a head start on getting in the day’s fiber. The almond jelly was probably store bought rather than made in-house, but then there’s something about having an entire dessert course in your breakfast that proves beyond doubt that you’re on vacation.

All in all, the breakfast was not as grand as the dinner, but I didn’t expect it to be. There was plenty of variety and flavours (especially of seafood), and we checked out of Kiyomizuya with a radiant glow that could only come from a belly full of nutritious food and onsen-infused skin.

Ratings

In the course of reviewing two restaurants sporting two Michelin stars each – Sühring in Bangkok and Kwonsooksoo in Seoul, I developed a rating system for scoring haute cuisine. I look at three domains:  the visual presentation, the taste of the food, and the “wow” factor – how much I was surprised by some element of the dish. 

The scale goes from 0 to 10, with 0 meaning I can literally do better myself, 5 being on par with what I expect, and 10 being unbelievable and out of this world. Naturally, this is a subjective rating, and how well a restaurant does is pretty strongly dependent on how high my expectations were.

Now, Kiyomizuya does not have any Michelin stars. It’s also primarily an onsen resort rather than a restaurant, so the food is not its main focus. However, to keep things consistent, I will still use the same rating scale. Although because the menu was not as complex as a genuine fine dining establishment, I will rate each meal as a whole instead of rating each dish separately.

Presentation: 5/10

The massive dinner spread is visually impressive, and many of the individual components have their charms like the delicately carved cucumber pickle. Japanese cuisine tends to naturally incorporate a lot of variation in colours, and there were some novel elements of the dining experience like drinking broth from a teapot.

The calm and understated presentation of the food is a contrast to the more dramatic gestures that you might see in Western haute cuisine where there is a dynamic quality to the meal – whether it be pouring a hot sauce over a chocolate shell to reveal a dessert, or choosing your own condiments and cutlery.

That difference could be from differences in culture, but could equally be from the difference in price – I literally had both breakfast and dinner, plus a hotel room for the night, AND liberal use of a well maintained hot spring for what it cost me to dine at Kwonsooksoo and Sühring.

All things considered, I am happy with what I got for what I paid. The food at Kiyomizuya punched above its weight class.

Taste: 6/10

Please be reminded that the scores I give are relative to my expectations, and my expectations for Japanese food in general are pretty high. Even so, the meals I had at Kiyozumaya exceeded them.

The dishes were well executed and made with excellent ingredients. On top of the overall solid performances, several pleasant surprises showed up here and there like the sweet and fresh sashimi, the curiously cheesy pork, and the sweet potatoes that were bursting with honeyed goodness.

Wow factor: 6/10

Again, the score is modest because it’s harder to be surprised by a cuisine that I’m already quite familiar with. Still, there were some old flavours that came together in new ways that impressed me.

First and foremost was the sweet potato boiled in honey (can you tell that I liked it a lot?). The toasted rice breading on the meat patty was novel to me, and I enjoyed discovering what red miso tastes like.

There was also the novelty of experiencing this sort of room service dining at a traditional onsen hotel. There’s something about having an elegant dinner after a relaxing hot bath that makes you feel pampered.

Reflections

The quality of food and service is roughly correlated with price. The meals were only a part of an entire onsen experience that costs about the same as a night at a two-Michelin star establishment. So of course it’s not going to be at the same level, but it’s still very good in its own right.

I appreciate how formal Japanese food like this comes in so many courses of small portions, because it lets me try a wide range of things without fatiguing my palette. In particular, I was impressed by how much flavours varied even with similar ingredients. Dashi was used in a lot of the dishes, from sauces to broths to pickles. But it was altered in each instance from the other ingredients it was cooked with, so that I was tasting something different every time.

It’s always fun to experience new foods on my travels, because I often get to bring something back. Like when I learned to make authentic Bolognese in Phuket, of all places. On this trip, getting to know dashi again – something I thought I was familiar with – from many different angles, sometimes more acidic, sometimes more sweet, inspires me to similarly make small alterations to my own cooking. Perhaps, when we get tired of our same old meal prep recipes, all we need is a small tweak to make familiar food feel fresh again.

SWR

30/10/2025

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