THENEWYORKER,OCTOBER11, 2021 11
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TABLESFORTWO
PHOTOGRAPH BY MOLLY MATALON FOR THE NEW YORKER; ILLUSTRATION BY JOOST SWARTE
Sarashina Horii
45 E. 20th St.
My first experience with soba, the thin
Japanese noodle made from buckwheat,
was at Honmura An, a temple of Zen
elegance in SoHo that, starting in 1991,
made its noodles by hand, on the prem-
ises, for sixteen years. It was also the first
time I had sea urchin, and Honmura An’s
soba with uni remains one of the forma-
tive (read: rapturous) meals of my life.
After that restaurant’s chef and owner,
Koichi Kobari, closed shop, in 2007, and
left for Tokyo (where he took over his
father’s soba restaurant, Honmura-an),
it wasn’t until Cocoron came along, a
few years later, that I fell, again, for soba.
Far from Honmura An’s hushed rev-
erence, the atmosphere at Cocoron, a
tidy hole in the wall on Nolita’s Kenmare
Street (one of a few locations over the
years), starts with its kooky, exuberant
menu. Full of pictures, charts, and quotes
from an unnamed source—“Get recovery
and energy if you’re not feeling well”;
“Toppings will always support you!”—it
dotes on how healthy and delightful its
many dishes, such as the ethereally silken
homemade tofu and the rich, spicy Mera
Mera Soba, are sure to be. The soba is
presented customarily, on trays holding
bamboo mats of noodles that were boiled
to order and quickly chilled (for the per-
fect consistency), bowls of cold dipping
sauce or pots of hot broth, and accoutre-
ments such as grated ginger or daikon.
When you’re almost finished, you get a
long-nosed pitcher of hot soba cooking
water to add to your waning soup, to ex-
tend both your virtue and your pleasure.
Now there’s a new kind of soba place
in town, with a history that harks back
a bit further than SoHo in the nineties.
Sarashina Horii, which opened in the
Flatiron district in July, is an outpost of
a restaurant in Japan that has been serv-
ing soba since 1789, when a member of
the Horii family, nine generations ago,
employed a method for milling only the
core of the buckwheat seed, rather than
the entire groat, to produce a white flour
finer than the usual brown buckwheat,
resulting in a delicate white noodle. The
fact that this soba, called sarashina, was,
according to the menu, “favored by the
Shogun family who lived in the Edo
Castle, as well as Imperial Families,” is
clearly meant to impress us, too.
The dining-room design—in coun-
terpoint to Sarashina Horii’s hundreds
of years of history, and, most likely, in
order to fit in with the highly competi-
tive in-the-now vibe of the surrounding
restaurants—swings modern-dramatic,
with moody, clandestine lighting, spare
furniture, a glimpse of a manicured rock
garden, and a canopy of what could even
be noodles dancing overhead.
The Japanese-whiskey and sho-
chu cocktails abide those looking for
a glamorous night out; the excellent
food abides everyone else. Black cod
with miso improves on Nobu’s famous
dish by mellowing the sweetness. Nods
to pomp and circumstance—hand tow-
els magically expanded with a tableside
pour of hot water, one large plush duck
meatball sizzling on a cast-iron slab, a
spectacular display of extremely fresh
sashimi—are subtly proffered in the
Japanese style of understated service,
in deference, always, to the customer.
But how are the famous noodles?
The ultra-clean-tasting sarashina noo-
dles have a smooth texture that, on one
night, almost disappeared when they
seemed to be cooked a tad too far; on
another, they had just the right amount
of bite, providing a fine accompaniment
to the soy-laced house broth or the mild
cold dipping sauce, livened up with rich
additions—tender duck breast, meaty
mushrooms, lightly battered lobster
tempura, glazed grilled eel. Both the
sarashina and the mori (traditional buck-
wheat) noodles fare generally better in
the cold preparations, where they retain
their intended firmness, than in a hot
soup that keeps them cooking.
For dessert, order “the great tiramisu,”
as one server put it. A small wooden box
is layered with deep-green matcha cake;
thick, subtly sweet cream; and a blanket
of matcha powder, grassy and slightly
bitter, like a sprinkling of nature. (Soba
dishes $16-$41.)
—Shauna Lyon
