Seafood tempura soba ($40.72)!
Saturday Japanese lunch — seafood tempura soba $40.72. Premium tempura selection over cold buckwheat noodles.
Saturday Japanese lunch with BB — seafood tempura soba at $40.72. The premium tempura selection paired with cold buckwheat noodles at a sit-down Japanese restaurant.
We ordered:
- Seafood tempura soba — $40.72
Soba (蕎麦) is the buckwheat noodle that’s the leaner, more rustic cousin of udon. Made from buckwheat flour (with varying ratios of wheat flour to bind), the noodles are dark-brown in colour with a distinctive nutty flavour and a slightly al dente bite. The premium soba uses 100% buckwheat (juwari soba); the standard soba uses 80-90% buckwheat.
The soba came as the cold zaru-style — chilled noodles served on a bamboo zaru with a small carafe of tsuyu dipping sauce on the side. Cold soba is the proper presentation for tasting the noodle quality clearly; warm soba in broth tends to mask the noodle character.
The eating ritual is the dip-and-slurp. Pick up a small bundle of noodles with chopsticks, dip the bottom third into the tsuyu, slurp loudly. The tsuyu (a dashi-shoyu-mirin mix) is concentrated, so you don’t submerge the noodles fully — just the bottom third.
Tsuyu came with a small dish of accompaniments: grated daikon, chopped scallion, fresh wasabi. You mix these into the tsuyu to taste, adjusting the dipping sauce flavour as you eat.
Seafood tempura selection was the premium component. Probably 4-5 pieces — a couple of prawns (the most generous), a piece of white fish, sliced squid, and maybe a scallop or oyster. Battered in airy panko-tempura batter, deep-fried to that golden translucent crisp.
The prawn tempura was the star. Properly battered, deep-fried until the prawn inside was just-cooked-snappy. The contrast of the hot crispy tempura against the cold rinsed soba is the entire point of the dish format.
A small bowl of soba-yu (the cooking water from the noodles) was served at the end — you pour it into the remaining tsuyu to drink as a finishing broth. The starch and buckwheat aromatics from the noodle cooking make this finishing drink the proper soba meal closer.
$40.72 for the premium seafood tempura soba is fair Japanese restaurant pricing.
Overall: 4.3 / 5. 😋👍🏼 Solid seafood tempura soba — would re-order.
