Kanda Matsuya

Kanda Matsuya opened in 1884 (Meiji 17) and still serves hand-cut soba in a wooden building that dates to the Taisho era — a survivor of both the 1923 earthquake's aftermath and the wartime fires that erased most of old Tokyo's wooden cityscape. The room is the experience as much as the noodles: low tables, shared seating, the clatter of a working soba hall that has done the same thing in the same place for 140 years. The writer Shotaro Ikenami, one of Japan's most beloved historical novelists, was a devoted regular, which fixed it permanently in the city's literary-culinary memory.

The soba itself is the Edo-Tokyo tradition done strictly. The buckwheat is milled and the noodles are cut by hand daily; they're served either cold on a bamboo screen (seiro) with a sharp dipping tsuyu, or hot in broth. The proper Tokyo way to eat cold soba — dip only the bottom third in the tsuyu, eat with audible speed, finish by drinking the sobayu (the cloudy water the noodles were boiled in) mixed into the leftover dipping sauce — is the entire ritual, and Matsuya is one of the best places to learn it because the room expects it.

For visitors, it's a genuine, non-touristic encounter with one of Tokyo's oldest continuously operating restaurants. The shared tables force a kind of low-key communality; the menu is short and traditional; the prices are still reasonable for what it is. It's the antithesis of a destination restaurant, which is precisely why eating soba here lands differently than at a polished modern shop.