Soba Koh

Occasion: Dinner with Abby
Location: Soba Koh on 5th St between 1st and 2nd Ave
Edibles: cold soba with slices of duck in a warm dipping sauce for me; hot soba with deep-fried tofu for Abby

Musings: I passed by this place a couple of times while on my way to Minca, and the chef making noodles in the window caught my attention. Abby and I decided to give Soba Koh a try after facing a crazy wait time at Ippudo.

As you may know, soba is made with buckwheat flour. Buckwheat flour has no gluten, unlike regular wheat flour, so making noodles with a high buckwheat content is very difficult because the dough is so brittle. Soba is commonly made using 80% buckwheat and 20% wheat flour. The highest quality soba contains 100% buckwheat. It takes Japanese chefs years, and sometimes decades, to fully master the technique. While I have no doubt that the soba noodles at Soba Koh are made with consummate skill - in fact, this place would probably be a real find for a soba connoisseur - I just happen to prefer a chewier noodle. (Texture-wise, it's sort of like the difference between a cracker and a chewy bread.)

The dish I got came as a pile of cold noodles and a bowl of hot, soy sauce-based dipping broth. (The duck was in the broth.) I'm not sure how this dish is supposed to work, but when I dipped the noodles in the broth, it made both sort of lukewarm. I also used the soup spoon provided to drink some of the broth, but it seemed too salty for that. (At Soba Totto, they come by at the end with a little carafe of the noodle cooking water for you to dilute the dipping sauce before drinking it.) Do drop me a line and tell me if you know whether I was eating it wrong.

My dish was $18; Abby's, slightly less. We walked out of the restaurant not exactly hungry, but definitely not full. We decided to get some fries at Pommes Frites (see following entry). It's never a good sign for a restaurant when you need more food immediately after.

Next time I'm down in the East Village for noodles, I will likely bypass Soba Koh in favor of my old faithful miso ramen at Minca.