One day this past spring while getting my hair cut I picked up a copy of a magazine that was featuring soba that month. I soon forgot the name of the magazine, but I didn’t forget about a soba shop in Asakusa that looked worth visiting; Asakusa Hirayama. I get a lot of my soba ideas, and awareness of good restaurants, looking through the many food magazines published in Tokyo and Japan, including Hirayama. Unfortunately, while I remembered where the shop was, I hadn’t noticed they were closed on Mondays and Tuesdays. After finally scheduling a shopping trip to Kappabashi to coincide with some soba lunch, I went on a Tuesday. Oops. Time to look up their hours on line.
The next time I went was a somewhat rainy Saturday in June. I had to wait outside for perhaps twenty minutes where I struck up a conversation with four young women from Shizuoka City who had arrived just before me. Once inside I quickly realized the reason for the wait; it can only seat a dozen or people at a time, with two tables for one or two, a large table for six, and a counter with five seats. I was seated at the counter.
There are not a lot of options on the menu, but what they have looked good, and interesting. I ordered a bowl of tomato and junsai kakisoba, which was cold soup and noodles with three slices of a half tomato with junsai on top. The tsuyu (soup) was excellent, with a very strong katsuo bushi flavor and aroma. Unfortunately, I wasn’t able to taste or smell the noodles as I do with cold noodles served with dipping tsuyu. I probably wouldn’t have been able to tell where the soba was from anyway is it was from Chiba, a prefecture not really known for soba. Still, it was a perfect cooling lunch on a hot and humid day. And it gave me a chance to scope out the rest of the menu (the anago tenpura looked really good!).
I returned to Hirayama again this week, this time on a weekday for lunch, hoping it wouldn’t be too crowded. I picked the timing of my visit just right; I only had to wait a few seconds outside in the heat while two customers were exiting. I again sat at the counter, this time on the far right side which gave me a decent view of the kitchen. I ordered seiro soba (¥1,000) and an order of the anaago tenpura (¥1,500). The soba arrived first, a serving of very long noodles made from Fukui prefecture soba (much more famous than Chiba soba!). The tsuyu was very Edo-style, meaning strong a salty. Perfect for the hot days of Tokyo summer. Just as I finished my su-su-ru (slurping), a large ceramic platter of tenpura was placed in from of me. It consisted of one piece of anago that had been cut in two, one piece of kabocha, and two long ingen (long beans). The guy cooking the tenpura who I am guessing is the owner remembered me from my prior visit. Sitting at the other end of the counter, where I sat before, was a young woman who ordered the tomato and junsai soba, the same as I had before.
Three young men came in while I was eating my anago and were seated at the big table. Listening to their conversation, I could tell that two of them were from the U.S., while the other was probably Japanese as he was reading the menu for the other two. After a bit of explanation about what was what, they ordered hot soba with yuba, sansho, and what looked like a small omelet on top (it was listed as tamago toji, but the egg was cooked in a small pan, not dropped in directly to cook). I noticed another customer eating the same thing. Perhaps I will try it myself some cold day in the future.
東京都台東区東浅草 1-3-1
Taitō-ku Nishiasakusa 1-3-14
Closed Mondays and Tuesdays