Spot guide · Naha 那覇
Photo: Naha Mama Pavilionz / CC0Okinawa's fish are the wrong colours. Electric blue, parrot green, hard red — reef fish that look like an aquarium and taste nothing like mainland Japanese seafood. The ground floor of Makishi is where you see them, alongside whole pig heads, sea grapes and the pork cuts that define this cuisine.
The system is the appeal: choose downstairs, pay for it, and carry it up to the second-floor restaurants, which cook it for a per-person fee. Rebuilt and reopened in 2023, the building is new but the trade in it is not.
Taxi in, market lunch, Kokusai-dori, taxi back.
Shuri in the morning, here for lunch, Tsuboya after.
It is the natural break between the north and south of the day.
You buy fish or meat from a vendor on the ground floor, then carry it up to the second-floor restaurants, which cook it for a per-person fee on top of what you paid. Ordering directly from an upstairs menu is possible but skips the point — and you can ask for one fish to be prepared two ways.
Reef fish — the electric blue and green ones — prepared as sashimi and butter-grilled from a single purchase, plus umibudo sea grapes eaten cold with ponzu. Okinawan pork dishes and Okinawa soba are available around the market, and Tsuboya pottery street is five minutes away.
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