Yagitosoba Taiyo, located ten minutes by car off the Okinawa Expressway Ishikawa Interchange,
is a goat cuisine restaurant that works hard to make the idiosyncratic flavor of goat meat
“more familiar, easier to eat, and easier to love”!

Owner and Uruma native Hiroya Nakanishi expanded the pens
he had used to raise goats in his spare time and increased the size of his herd,
feeding them corn, herbs, and unrefined sake dregs,
among other creative means combined to reduce the distinctive goat meat smell
and achieve a more tender consistency of meat.
These efforts bore fruit in two successive victories at the Gachimeshi Grand Prix,
an event which aims to “determine really delicious Okinawa cuisine.”

This is “yagi ramen” (goat ramen), the first winner of the Grand Prix.
The lightly-seasoned bonito stock soup of this goat meat-topped ramen item is the real clincher for the dish.
This is topped with Japanese mugwort, the flavor of which dissolves into the soup as you eat,
transforming the flavor.

The second Grand Prix winner was this “yagi Bolognese”, a goat-meat Bolognese sauce pasta.
This dish combines sticky pasta noodles with a sauce of goat meat cut up like corned beef
in thick sour tomato boiled for two to three days.
“We wanted something that was easy to eat and we really wanted to bring out the good parts of the goat meat,
so that it would not be covered up by the tomato,
” reflects Nakanishi. “We failed several times before we finally developed this sauce.”

“Goat meat is associated with soup, but we also want to focus on creative cuisine
so that we can expand goat cuisine outside of Okinawa,
into other prefectures and throughout the world,” Nakanishi said of his wishes for the future.