This post was written in 2008. Shop details and prices may have changed since then.
I finally went to a famous soba shop in Azabu-Juban with a tradition going back more than 200 years. Places like this are delicious pretty much 100% of the time. If a shop has survived 200 years on soba alone, it can’t be ordinary. It’s just not in my nature to bother going somewhere when I already know how it’ll turn out, so I kept putting it off, but this time I finally went.
I was all over the place this time, so I’m skipping the storefront shot for now. I’ll have to go back and take one.
Chopsticks
Posting this for white balance, and as proof that I went to Sarashina. The writing’s upside down.
They bring out two kinds of tsuyu.
The white one is the spicy (karakuchi) one and the green one is the sweet (amakuchi) one. To a Korean palate the “spicy” one isn’t spicy at all, so either one will taste about the same.
This is what they call yakumi
You add it to the tsuyu.
Grilled chicken, ordered as a side dish.
It’s art. The sauce, the skin, the meat, all perfect. If I ignore the pressure of paying 680 yen for three pieces, I’d happily eat as much as they put in front of me. What surprised me even more, though, was the pickled daikon on the side, which makes the chicken even better. It reminded me of French cooking.
Rolled omelette
A soba shop that can cook eggs this soft… a 200-year tradition doesn’t come from nowhere. But again, the prices hurt.
We ordered two hot soba and two cold soba. But once we’d ordered, I realized one hot and three cold would’ve been better. The cold soba was way better.. -_- By the nature of soba, the hot versions are weaker at almost every shop, and I didn’t think it through. (A place I went to recently had really delicious hot soba, so I think my instincts got dulled.)
The tempura for the kakiage soba
It looks like a work of art
And this is the noodles
You just combine them and eat. They used their regular noodles for it.
Kamo nanban, which seems to be the house specialty
The broth on this one was a bit lacking. It should have had a deeper duck flavor, but it was really faint. It’s not that it tasted bad, but this isn’t kamo nanban, it’s just hot soba with some duck on top.
Mori soba
The most basic form of soba. The springiness of the noodles and the clean, refined soba flavor are a notch above your average soba shop. But I did think the mori soba was a bit too firm. The joy of high-end soba is noodles that slide playfully around your mouth and slip right down your throat, and a mori soba where refinement and roughness coexist feels awkward and in-between.
But the shop’s signature soba, the sarashina soba, had none of those weaknesses. You could call it another perfect form that soba should aspire to. The thin white noodles, made only from the inner core of the buckwheat, are a bit like somen in a way and feel just as fresh, but their strong springiness and overflowing flavor give you exactly the pleasure you can only get from pure soba. It was a taste that made me seriously reconsider how delicious soba made from nothing but buckwheat can be.
But maybe because I wolfed it down too fast, sadly I have no photos of it this time. I checked my photos at home and kicked myself. How could I forget that.. I’ll go back soon and post photos.
This is soba-yu.
It’s the water the soba was boiled in. When you’re done with the soba, you pour it into your tsuyu and drink it like tea. It might be a bit like Korean sungnyung (scorched-rice water), and this one was also brewed much stronger than at other shops, so it was really delicious.
The high prices bother me a little, but it’s not like the portions are small either. On top of that, the flavor lives up to the price, so if you love soba, make the time to go.
Other visits to this place