Sapporo was heading for 32 degrees on August 12th, the kind of day when simply getting anywhere feels like work.
My destination was Shabazo, which you can reach through the underground walkway, so moving around in the heat is mercifully easy.
The walkway connects directly to the building, so you can arrive without stepping outside in summer or winter.
I got there at 11:24 and found nine people already in line.
The queue seems to be there even on weekdays, and plenty of people book ahead, so it is worth lining up early if you want to be sure of a table.
I was seated at 11:32 and ordered at 11:38.
I chose the simmered lamb hamburg in lamb-bone soup, heat level 1, at 1,650 yen.
You pick either nine or fifteen vegetables, and I went with nine.
They also set out a paper apron, and small touches like that are welcome.
The room was already full by then, though with the Obon holiday underway the crowd felt slightly thinner than usual.
The bowl arrived at 11:51 in an earthenware pot, and lifting the lid revealed the soup still bubbling.
I had been told level 2 was medium, but level 1 was plenty hot, closer to what I would call a 3 or a 4.
The first sip was remarkably fresh, and although I had braced myself for something heavy from lamb stock, the colour was not especially dark and the body was fairly light.
Clove comes through clearly, and the soup seems to work on the body as much as the palate.
Salt barely registers, which makes me think the balance of spice and salt here is unusually good. Probably, at least.
Basil sits on the surface and there is little oil.
The vegetables were lotus root, cabbage, aubergine, potato, carrot, green pepper, quail egg, daikon, fried burdock and pumpkin.
The menu lists the hamburg at 160 grams, though it looks a little larger than that on the plate.
The mince is finely ground so it lacks the coarse, meaty chew, but it clings to the soup all the better, and lamb stock and lamb mince stack up on each other.
It has enough depth to stand up to the soup, so I imagine a fair amount of spice and salt goes into it, and it was very good.
The daikon and carrot were simmered soft, the aubergine came as half a piece with a lattice of hidden cuts scored into it.
The burdock is coated in a light batter and carries a salty edge that works well.
Ten minutes into the meal the soup was still piping hot, which is the earthenware pot doing its job.
I cannot say how many millilitres it holds, but it feels about 50 more than the usual place, and it stayed good to the last spoonful.
I paid and stepped out to find five or six people waiting.
It was 12:15, and with many offices already on their Obon break, an ordinary weekday is surely busier than this.
Lamb soup may not read as gamey at all to people in Hokkaido, who eat lamb through jingisukan, but visitors less used to it might find it quite distinctive.
My own view is that soup curry works best when the spice hits hard and something with a bit of character meets it, which is why natto tastes fine in it and mackerel loses its fishiness.
In that sense a little gaminess is a virtue rather than a fault, and this is the bowl for anyone curious about a soup curry slightly off the beaten path.
