Some say that finishing off with soba after drinking beer with a few side dishes is a sign of a soba connoisseur, but quite a few of our customers order soba and beer at the same time right from the beginning. And that’s fine. Soba has always been common folks’ fast food since the Edo period, anyway. Sure, there are soba connoisseurs’ opinions, and I find many of them convincing, but I don’t think it’s a good idea to be too preachy. At a soba place, you are free to enjoy yourself any way you like.

Of course, I put a lot of time and effort into my soba preparation, though. Matsuya’s soba uses buckwheat flour and wheat flour in a ten to two ratio. We use egg and water instead of water only to make the dough. It’s the right flavor, texture, firmness and aftertaste that makes good soba. Our belief is that, to achieve good soba noodles, it’s better not to use 100% buckwheat flour, contrary to some experts’ view.

We use different dashi (Japanese broth) to make our dipping sauce for soba served cold on its own and our soup in which soba is served hot. The sauce/soup and soba noodles must be balanced to make good soba; neither should overpower the other. The sauce for cold soba is too salty to drink, but it’s tasty when soba noodles are dipped in it. After finishing your soba, you may want to drink some of the left-over sauce by diluting it with hot sobayu (water in which your noodles have been boiled), and when you do so, the flavor of the dashi sealed in the sauce softly opens up. To me it’s wonderful when customers appreciate this clean flavor.

KIRIN ICHIBAN is a beer that goes well with food. Neither too heavy nor too light, it offers a solid taste and satisfaction in its clean flavor. The new KIRIN ICHIBAN, in particular, is even better balanced. In the end, it’s a good balance that makes good beer as well. And the same goes for the soba-beer relationship: this particular beer and our soba, as they both offer a clean flavor in common, are well balanced and well matched. That’s the reason we began serving the new KIRIN ICHIBAN in medium-size bottles in the fall of 2017.
(Remarks by Takayuki Odaka, Owner)