OpenHarvest Japan: First Soba Supper

By the time you read this, Yoko and I will be in Niigata, Japan, a prefecture three hours north of Tokyo, on the west coast, the side of the Japan Sea. It's also directly west of Fukushima City, home of the Daiichi Power Plant. We will be visiting a sake brewery, as well as harvesting rice. Yup.

Yoko and I just landed in Tokyo, where we'll be spending the next three weeks with the OPENrestaurant crew for a project here called OPENharvest. We'll be visiting many farms, fisheries, brewers and distillers, all which will culminate in a fancy bash at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Tokyo, bringing together food enthusiasts, farmers, and food purveyors. We are totally ecstatic and can't wait to start our adventure, which will be heavily blogged, I hope.

Exhausted and delirious, Yoko and I stumbled into a soba shop in Azabu-Juban section of Tokyo tonight, right near where we are staying. Yoko had wanted to come here for quite some time now, so this was a special treat. We started with beautiful cuts of fresh kamaboko (fish cake, above photo), washing down the futon-fluffy bites with cold sake.



Yoko's hand-pulled zaru soba (cold soba):



My hot soba with chicken and scallions:



The soup tasted so damn deep, refined clear, bright. It was a heartwarming first supper in Japan, with many more special meals to come.

As I stood up from the table, heart warm and full of soup, I broke the delicate sake glass. That's when I knew it was time for me to get the hell to bed.