The Wonder of a Good Meal
on memorable food and eating soba in Kyoto
Kyoto, Japan
Years ago, I made a reservation for two at the most expensive restaurant Jordan and I had ever been to. We didn’t have much money then, certainly not the kind of money to splurge on a luxury dinner. But we were in Charleston on military orders with $75/day to cover our meals. We’d eat a sad continental breakfast at the government-provided hotel, snack for lunch, and indulge ourselves with dinners of fresh seafood, duck fat fries and beer, gourmet grilled cheese and doughnuts, and finally the main event: our reservation at Husk—a fine dining restaurant in historic downtown Charleston that “begins with an unprecedented exploration of Southern food that’s deeply rooted in local ingredients.”
Time has fudged my memory of the full meal. But a scene holds of a dimming sky and balcony view of the garden street below. Fans spun above us, attached to a haint blue ceiling common in the south to keep evil spirits at bay. Notes of ham hock and fried oysters wafted in the air as a waiter opened the double doors and set a log on the table between us, adorned with an appetizer of scratch-made buttermilk biscuits and country ham with housemade pimento cheese and pickles.
There’s an entire Reddit page called We Want Plates, dedicated to the absurd alternatives trendy restaurants use for dinnerware—Redditers demand a return to simplicity and ease. I get it—restaurants have gone too far, serving meals on shovels and bare hands, metal baskets, even just directly on the table. But this log with salty ham and buttery biscuits smeared with creamy pimento cheese is a noteworthy food memory for me. Worth the entirety of that per diem.
This was the first time I’d ever visited a restaurant I’d seen highlighted on television. I’d learned about Husk from the show Mind of a Chef, and made a reservation because I wanted to sample the freshness Chef Sean Brock elevates in his dishes building on heritage and “enhancing classic flavors.”
Soba in Kyoto
Years after our luxurious dinner at Husk, I made another reservation at a restaurant I learned about from one of my favorite foodie shows: Somebody Feed Phil. In his episode on Kyoto, Phil makes his way around the vibrant, mega city, sampling street food like Mitarashi Dango (sweet rice balls on a stick), sharing coffee and toast with Japan’s oldest licensed tour guide, and dining on soba noodles and buckwheat porridge. It’s the soba I was most intrigued to try, especially as Phil is introduced to Juu-go by Rene Redzepi, a Michelin-star chef of Copenhagen’s Noma who says Juu-go is one of his favorite restaurants in the world.
Japan’s been perfecting the art of soba for around 400 years. Traditionally made from buckwheat, soba is a type of Japanese “soul food,” an integral component of Japanese food culture. A quote from this Japanese travel website says, “While they say a ramen lover will travel to the next town to find good ramen, the soba lover will travel across the country.”
Perhaps the soba-curious will travel halfway across the world.
Owner Akiya Ishibashi rejects the identity of chef and calls himself a farmer, embracing a minimalist ethos that elevates a few ingredients to hone basic dishes. The work of food creation begins with tilling, planting, harvesting, and milling before any feeding is done. Once in the restaurant, Akiya takes the milled buckwheat flour cultivated by his hands and creates only two dishes: sobagaki (porridge) and soba noodles.
The cash-only soba shop is situated along Kyoto’s Philosopher’s Path in a quiet neighborhood. There’s only a handful of counter seats and Akiya is the only shop employee, welcoming guests with reservations, pouring beer, sake, and water, and preparing fresh porridge and noodles on the other side of the counter. From our vantage point, we watched as he bent over the dough, kneaded with force, sliced each noodle into perfectly even strips. His body was covered in buckwheat dust as he moved around the tiny workspace with ease, gathering noodles to boil, mixing porridge over the hot stove.
I’d reserved two porridges, two sobas, and two beers, intent on sampling everything Juu-go had to offer. But Akiya humbly cautioned us to share the porridge (I imagine he’s witnessed a fair share of confused westerners). The porridge was served in a piping hot ceramic dish; an unassuming sticky, thick, blob. I’ve never tasted something so of the earth. Phil says the porridge elicits childhood memories. But this porridge is unlike the cream of wheat and sugary oatmeal of my childhood. It was something else entirely. Mixed with horseradish and roasted buckwheat grains, the porridge was thick and hearty, spicy and nutty.
Rene says Akiya is “modern thinking. He wants to progress, to make better agriculture. He wants to make better noodles.” This sort of modern thinking earned Akiya a Michelin green star, awarded to restaurants “that uphold outstanding sustainable and eco-friendly culinary practices.”
The farmer presented our soba with instructions: taste the noodles on their own first. Before mixing with the dashi, soy, and horseradish, taste it plain to discern the flavor, and appreciate the nuances of the buckwheat. We held our chopsticks awkwardly and gathered up the cool noodles, noting the slight bitterness, chewiness, and earthiness. Then we took another bite, adding horseradish and soy before dipping the noodles in the dashi. Each bite was an individual experience. Each addition added something: sweet soy to bitter buckwheat, crunchy horseradish to chewy noodles. Akiya stood nearby with crossed arms, recovering for the hard work of noodle-making, watching intently as his customers enjoyed the work of his hands.
“How did you hear about my shop?” he asked as I slurped a noodle. “Netflix,” I said a bit sheepishly. He nodded and I wondered if the TV show had been good or bad for business, if it had encouraged incurious Westerners and internet influencers prone to leaving bad reviews for food they failed to understand. Some meals don’t translate well to social media—even the porridge cameo in Somebody Feed Phil failed to arouse my hunger pangs. More than anything, I wanted to experience the story behind the shop, the passionate farmer eliminating food waste, reconnecting with a food heritage, and subtly revolutionizing an ancient dish.
It was like experiencing an artist’s workshop, a true look into the brilliant mind of a chef. Or farmer. For an hour, we sat in relative silence as the other customers occasionally chatted, as chopsticks clinked against dinnerware, as Akiya vehemently kneaded the buckwheat dough. Earthen flavors lingered on our tongues. Noodles slurped into our mouths until our plates cleared and Akiya took our remaining dashi and added hot water—presenting a hot soup made from the cold stock we’d dipped our noodles into.
Akiya is no celebrity chef despite his brief appearance on Somebody Feed Phil. He’s a humble artist who doesn’t even believe his soba is the best soba. I have no metric for judging soba but I do have a metric for discerning love of craft—which I saw embodied in this hospitable farmer. It was the sort of experience that will sit with me long after the flavor memories of thick porridge and chewy noodles fade. It’s rare to eat food prepared by the hands that grew it in the first place. But the specialness of a dish increases with such up-closeness to the process, a reminder that food is far more complex than what’s presented on a plate, than even tourist reviews can convey.
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