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 […]
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After nearly two and a half years, I finally was able to make soba again this past Saturday with the Nihonbashi Konanokai (日本橋粉の会). The group had made soba a month or so ago, but I was in Oregon at the time. There were only ten of us this time, down from the usually fifteen or twenty people. And while we did have a small party after finishing making soba, we did not eat any of our production. […]
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Tansōan Soba Lunch 丹想庵蕎 I happened to be in Asakusa around lunchtime today so I decided to swing by one of my favorite soba shops, Tansōan, for a good—and cheap—tenpura and soba lunch. I’ve been a fan of this place for over ten years, since a year or two after it opened, back when I was trying to eat lunch at every soba shop in the area, way back before Kenji san, the owner, received a Michelin […]
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Sonoji 浅ノ字 My wife and I just finished a wonderful lunch of tenpura and soba at Sonoji, a Michelin one-star restaurant that is only a few second walk from our home in Ningyōchō. When Sonoji first opened I often went for soba lunch, with a piece or two or three of ala carte tenpura. But those days are long gone; it is now course only, although in the evening there are two choices for the course, one […]
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The other night I had dinner with my wife and a couple of friends at a nice little soba izakaya in Meguro called Kawasemi (川せみ). The occasion was to have a night out with ‘Y’’ a Japanese friend who now lives in New York who had to come to Japan due to her ninety-five year old mother’s recent death, the dinner not just an opportunity to honor her mother, who the rest of us all knew, but […]
Read moreAs part of my great endeavor to walk all of the five highways of old Japan (the go kaidō, or 五街道), this summer a friend and I set out to walk the shortest of the five, the old Nikkō Kaidō from Nihonbaashi to Nikkō and its main attraction, the Tōshōgū, the mausoleum honoring the first shogun, Tokugawa Ieyasu. The distance for this journey is not too great, only around 140 km. Walking an average of around 30 […]
Read moreA month or so ago the owner of Lapin, bistro type restaurant in Nakakaruizawa where we had dinner, recommended a couple of soba restaurants he liked. One of them was a bit out of the way, so we had to wait until we returned this past weekend to drive out towards the city of Komoro to try Kirishita Soba. Actually, the full name is Jigonaya Kirishita soba (地粉や 霧下蕎麦), the name meaning something like locally produced soba made […]
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