A note on the words: soba is buckwheat noodles, and teuchi means the shop cuts them by hand; sobamae is the custom of drinking at a soba house first and eating the noodles last; sobagaki is buckwheat flour worked with hot water into a soft dumpling; soba miso is miso mixed with buckwheat grains, eaten in small bites with a drink. Kaeshi is the soy, sugar and mirin base a soba shop mixes with dashi to make its dipping broth. Basashi is raw horse, a specialty of Aizu in the north; otoshi is the small appetizer you are charged for on sitting down. Shinshu is the old name for Nagano. Prices are as of this writing (August 2026).
Teuchi Soba Kikuya, Sugamo main shop, on Tabelog (English) — opening hours, payment details and the Japanese address are kept up to date there, not here.
I want to eat something good today as well. This is Hangover Meshi. Here is a soba shop I have wanted to visit for ages: Teuchi Soba Kikuya, the main shop in Sugamo. The rating is very high, certainly, but the pleasure of the place is the course built around sobamae — drinking first, then eating the soba at the end. The snacks at a soba shop are always good, are they not? They take their dashi seriously and their kaeshi is good, which I imagine is the reason. You cannot order the course if you arrive after 11:30, so we hurried.
The Sakura Tram — the Toden Arakawa Line, is it not? I had not ridden it in years. Koshinzuka is the nearest stop.
Lunch course, 4,000 yen
>Our courses are composed for those who wish to drink in the manner of a soba house.
What a wonderful thing to have written down. Right — let us drink until the soba arrives.
Beer to start.
Smoked mackerel, pickles, and cream cheese steeped in kaeshi.
The smoked mackerel is extremely good. Plump, with the smoke on top of a rich sauce and the savor of the fish underneath. Good! And the cream cheese steeped in kaeshi — sweet, with a fine aroma — is very good indeed. I still have the kaeshi I made the other day at home. I shall buy some cream cheese and steep it.
Tempura! Excellent!
Sobagaki tempura, prawn and mushroom — a fairly vegetarian sort of selection, in a thin, crisp batter with the inside juicy. Soba-shop tempura really is good. Irresistible. I am going to have to order sake.
And the lean horse sashimi here is unbelievably good.
So good you stop and ask whether it really is horse. Strong in savor and very tender. A dab of garlic miso and the garlic and the miso open out across the mouth. Not remotely strong in the way lean meat can be; the flavor is mellow. Well now. I have rarely eaten horse sashimi this good. I wonder whether all horse from Aizu is like this.
Hold on — this is a soba shop, is it not?
I have never eaten sobagaki this good.
I make it at home now and then, but it is never much good, or rather it never comes out this fluffy. The flour is entirely different, of course, but so this is what sobagaki is. Like this, it genuinely works as something to drink with.
And at the end, two kinds of soba in small portions.
Properly chilled, and superb going down. A faint sweetness spreads out and the bite is firm without being hard. The sort that gives up the savor of the flour the more you chew, standing up to the dipping broth without being heavy. The scent of the soba comes up well too. Good.
Kanasago, in Ibaraki, is a buckwheat-growing district known for its Kanasago soba. This one, by contrast, has been aged, and one mouthful in: yes, good. The character is a rounded flavor and a deeper scent. Now that I think of it, the first one did have a certain sharpness. Resting it must settle the flour. The sweetness and the body come further forward than before.
Soft the moment you draw it in, savor spreading as you chew, and a long finish. This one is good as well.
So: drinking, with snacks to go alongside, and two kinds of soba to close. Thoroughly satisfying. Drinking first is a great pleasure — every one of the snacks really is good. The tempura was fine and the soba at the end was superb. It has left me wanting to come at night. Bookings seem relatively easy to get (lunch, where you can drink, is my recommendation), so why not go?
Teuchi Soba Kikuya, Sugamo main shop (Soba / Koshinzuka, Shin-Koshinzuka and Sugamo-shinden Stations)
Tabelog lunch rating ★★★☆☆ 3.8
I ate here and paid for it myself. Nothing on this site is a comped meal.
One more for the road?
