As I keep saying, the heat makes me want to eat cold noodles, and I finally put into effect my standard methodology of using the googles to find some likely new venues. Searching out “Hiyashi Chuka Ranking” produced a few weird sites (there’s no hiyashichukadb yet, sadly), and one of them listed at the top this place, which I had conveniently seen in this guy’s pretty nice noodle blog (allowing for the fact that he constantly goes to the same places and repeat-posts them).
They’ve been doing business for 103 years (as of 2010), so they must be doing something right. Something they’re not doing right is the decor, which is like pretty much every other ‘authentic’ Chinese restaurant, which is to say ‘yellowing and industrial’. My camera does impart a yellow cast, but this is ridiculous. It’s funny, I’ve been to a Chinese restaurant decor specialty store, but I didn’t see them selling yellowed walls there.
Boom, it’s 冷し中華山 (the Mountain of Cold Chinese Noodles). Should we call it 中華ヶ岳? That almost sounds like something in the Southern Alps, doesn’t it? I digress. These are pretty intense noodles, very tall, very piled, lots of different things around the back too. Pleasingly, the ham is actually anise-spiked chashu (‘spiked’ is a great word for food writers, almost on the level of ‘infused’, and maybe a little more hip than ‘shot through’ or ‘studded’). The soup is appropriately sweet, sour and refreshing.
And you know, under that mountain of toppings, there are more toppings – a few quail eggs and meatballs. As you might guess, this was a touch more in the quantity rather than quality vein (except that pork, which was great), and the price was also more quantity (Y1470, which other bloggers agree is a bit rich).
This, though, seems to be a pretty famous hiyashi chuka, so I’m glad I got into it.
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Your random picture for today is a food delivery scooter, or more accurately the system of shocks and racks on which they put the food. I love these because they have the look of 1950’s ingenuity, updated not a bit for the 2010’s. The only thing better than this is what I saw the previous day, i.e. a guy in a white chef’s coat riding a bike one-handed with a lunch set on a tray balanced on his shoulder. It looks like certain doom, but I bet lunches used to get delivered that way all the time.
The ramen delivery suspension system! What an invention. I remember seeing this attached to a smal motor bike, Honda "Cub" (50cc engine) in my days in Japan. I am disappointed that no newer "ramen Segway" device with 3 gyroscopes has been invented. Keep your ramdom pictures coming.