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We track down a special dish hidden inside Yodobashi Akihabara 【SoraNews24 Taste Test】

Oona McGee Feb 7, 2018
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If you know where to look, you’ll be able to try a jugful of noodles that nobody wanted the owner to create.

These days, a good portion of customers make their dining choices based on the ‘Gram. Which means business owners everywhere are scrambling to come up with unique-looking dishes that diners will want to photograph and share on social media, adding followers to Instagram accounts, and money in pockets, in a continuous cycle that appears to be growing more and more every day.

Mr Sato, our resident foodie expert here at SoraNews24, recently heard about a little-known menu item starting to gain traction with foodies in the capital. And this particular dish isn’t served at a high-class restaurant or a cute, pastel-walled eatery. Instead, it’s served inside a well-known Akihabara electronics store.

Mr. Sato was eager to find out what all the fuss was about, so he headed down to Akihabara and made his way to the iconic Yodobashi Camera electronics store. Here, on the eighth floor, is a food court, and Mr Sato wandered around until he found what he was looking for: an izakaya tavern called Yotteba.

If you weren’t aware of what to look for, chances are you would miss it, but Mr Sato’s eye was trained to zone in on one particular dish, and it wasn’t long before he found it.

▼ Mr Sato had made the journey to try this jugful of noodles.

The small poster outside the tavern featured the “Tsukimi Soba Jug” in all its glory. Available only for a limited time, it proclaimed “Recommended for SNS“, (social media is called “SNS” in Japan) as well as “Even Yodobashi was surprised“.

Mr Sato was surprised too, especially by this part of the poster, which revealed that the concept of the dish was born from the mind of Yotteba’s Akihabara outlet manager, who wanted to develop this as an original product for the store. When those around him were against it, telling him to give up on the idea, he took down the naysayers by adding it to the menu anyway, and the Tsukimi Soba Jug was born.

Mr. Sato, who knows all too well what it’s like to stare down opponents who get in the way of one’s dreams, was intrigued by this backstory, which added an extra tasty flavour to the already much-hyped dish.

When the jug of noodles arrived at the table, though, our reporter wasn’t sure whether to eat it with chopsticks or simply chug it down like a beer.

▼ The noodles were served in a Dewar’s Scotch whisky glass, adding to the confusion.

After comparing it to his glass of Oolong tea, Mr Sato decided to drink the thing on the right and eat the thing on the left, taking up a pair of chopsticks to complete the task.

Tsukimi translates to “moon-viewing” in Japanese, and is often used when referring to dishes that contain a raw or over easy egg, given its round, moon-like appearance.

Tsukimi soba is a popular noodle dish in Japan, and the one here looked just like any other…only it was sitting inside a jug. The topping looked beautiful in the slim glass container, though, and Mr Sato stopped to admire it for a moment before tucking in.

As he lifted the noodles to his mouth, the raw egg came apart, mixing in with all the other ingredients, and after his first mouthful, he was pleasantly surprised. Given that this was a tavern on top of an electronics store, and not a specialty soba shop, he wasn’t expecting much, but the quality was actually really good.

It had a great homely flavour, much like the noodles you get from a standing soba shop at a train station platform. However, unlike those noodles, which come served in regular bowls, this one was served up in a tall glass, which, as our reporter found halfway through the dish, became increasingly difficult to eat.

“Who on earth came up with this idea?” thought Mr Sato, as he struggled to eat the remainder of his meal at the bottom of the glass. “Why didn’t anyone stop him from making this?” he wondered, and then he remembered the poster.

Mr Sato realised that everyone had actually tried to stop the manager from adding the creation to the menu but he went his own way and went ahead with it anyway.

And then Mr Sato wondered if all of his own naysayers might have been on to something too, when they tried to make him listen to reason during his crazy escapades. Immediately, he shrugged the thought off, as it all suddenly became too deep for him. Almost as deep as the Tsukimi Soba Jug ramen.

Restaurant Information

Yotteba Yodobashi Akiba Store / 酔っ手羽　ヨドバシAKIBA店
Address: Tokyo-to, Chiyoda-ku, Kanda Hanaokacho 1-1 Yodobashi Akiba8F
東京都千代田区神田花岡町1-1 ヨドバシAKIBA８F
Hours: 11 a.m.-4 p.m. (lunch) 4:00 p.m.-11:00 p.m. (dinner)
Website (Japanese)