Takayama: Ebisu Honten
Freshly made soba, originally uploaded by snapperwolf*.
The Lonely Planet guide is a bit hit and miss with food recommendations. I don’t understand why it needs to tell you about Indian cuisine in Tokyo - surely no-one is going there expecting to have the best Rogan Josh this side of Bombay? Sure, if you’ve been living there as an expat for a few months and are craving food other than Japanese - but that’s not really the Lonely Planet audience is it?
I digress. We stayed in Takayama for 3 days for the Spring Festival. Our first day there, we perused the Lonely Planet for recommendations for lunch. Usually we found that the Lonely Planet restaurants were well aware of their literary fame and were either too busy or too ‘westernized’. So it was with grains of salt, we approached followed not long enough by a European family that were on our train from Kyoto also brandishing said guide book. Sigh.But the bowls of steaming hot soba shut us up quick smart. The broth was delicate and homely. The soba toothsome and alive. Husband had mountain vegetable(sansai soba) and I had tempura. My prawn and shiso leaf tempura were fresh and crunchy. After paying, we spent some time watching the man in the window making fresh soba wringing the flour and finally cutting it into thin perfect strips.So its not such a lonely planet after all, but with soba as good this - who wants to be alone?
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