Fukudaya

Hanging its shop curtain along a quiet residential street in Shakujiidai, Fukudaya is a neighbourhood soba shop with an expansive, tempting menu. The mealtime mainstays are its generous combination sets matching rice bowls with soba. Classics like pork katsudon or crisp shrimp cutlet don can be paired with either hot or chilled soba, offering the hearty satisfaction of a rice bowl alongside the smooth slurp of buckwheat noodles. The tiered awase tenju presents tenda and soba in stacked boxes, alongside other options like kakiage, toriten chicken tempura, or negi-shio pork.

For standalone soba, the bill includes chilled tanuki, chilled kitsune, chilled kinoko mushrooms, and niku seiro served with generous pieces of pork and scallions. In true neighbourhood soba shop fashion, the Chinese-style noodle dishes are equally hard to overlook, with ramen, tanmen, moyashi soba, and gomoku chuka soba sharing space on the menu. That breadth makes ordering easy even when dining companions arrive with very different cravings.

Appetizers like itawasa sliced fish cake, skewered duck, maguro yamakake with grated yam, mackerel simmered in miso, and various deep-fried sides make it just as appealing to settle in with beer or sake. Counterbalanced by unpretentious table seating, the dining room suits a quiet solo lunch just as well as a family dinner. Note that payments are cash only, so having bills ready ensures a seamless visit.