Ittoan

※ Guests are requested to note that Ittoan only takes reservations for dinner service. ——— In the world of soba, juwari soba is the holy grail. Made from 100 percent buckwheat flour, juwari is the gold standard because of its “purity”: most soba shops sell soba that is mixed with another type of flour (usually wheat) due to the difficulty and cost of making juwari. Pure buckwheat noodles are brittle and prone to breaking during the process, often forcing chefs to start from scratch. Guests will find juwari at the Michelin Bib Gourmand-awarded Ittoan, no doubt. But they will also find soba noodles made from various ratios of wheat flour and buckwheat flour, like ni-hachi, which is 80 percent buckwheat. That’s because Ittoan’s head chef Yoshikawa Kunio believes that all types of soba are deserving of appreciation. More people need to appreciate the effort that goes into growing soba, he says. Soba is nothing without the people who plant, cultivate and harvest the plants that will eventually turn into his noodles. And so, armed with this philosophy, Chef Yoshikawa regularly travels around the country on his days off, from Hokkaido to Okinawa, seeking out soba farmers with whom he can establish a personal connection. Chef Yoshikawa even goes so far as to help his producers with their harvest, joining them in the fields to scythe through the tall stalks of buckwheat. It is with this same diligence that he mills the buckwheat and rolls out the buckwheat in his kitchen by hand, offering two types of juwari and one type of ni-hachi every day. While it might seem a daunting task for a chef who works alone in the kitchen, he doesn’t see it as work: rather, it’s an opportunity to show off the passion and effort of his producers — as evidenced by the reverence in which he places daily samples of the buckwheat he uses on the counter, accompanied by the name of the famer who raised it. Guests can expect not just excellent soba at Ittoan, but a bevy of beautifully made soba-mae as well: the side dishes that come before the main dish of noodles. Perhaps unusually for a soba restaurant, the most popular soba-mae on the menu is the tofu santenmori, a tasting comparison of three types of tofu: silken tofu, miso-marinated tofu and yuba tofu skin. Michelin Guide: 2017 - Bib Gourmand