Soba Koh

The simple act of walking down a different street can expose one to an exciting food adventure. Last night, I intended to pick up a snack at Caracas Arepa Bar. But as I walked up 2nd Avenue, I thought to myself, why not turn right on East 5th Street instead of East 6th? Soon, I was learning about the great culinary reputation of Hokkaido, Japan's northernmost island, and about ingredients like myoga, a kind of wild ginger which grows in in Japanese country backyards. Soba Koh was the setting for this enjoyable lesson, and Miho, a charming waitress, was my guide to the menu.

The Hakodate-born chef of Soba Koh, formerly of Takahachi Restaurant, is now pleasing our palates with slightly chewy, hand-cut, speckled buckwheat soba noodles. Soba is delicious both hot and cold, but there is nothing more refreshing than swirling a pile of cold noodles in a bracing soy-wasabi sauce.

The menu at Soba Koh features many ways to enjoy hot or cold soba: with yam and quail egg, duck and eggplant, or soft-shell crab, or in a daily special (last night, it was sea eel tempura soba).

There's also a mouthwatering selection of appetizers, including many permutations of buckwheat... sobagome, agesoba, and agedashi sobayaki (fried soba gnocchi stuffed with chicken). I opted instead for the homemade organic tofu, which was topped with a blanket of intensely green basil sauce and the aforementioned myoga. The spicy topping was a perfect foil for the cool, mild cubes of tofu.

Then, I feasted on the soba special, which consisted of two large strips of battered sweet eel, a shishito pepper, a large plate of noodles, soy-ginger sauce, scallions and wasabi. As I slurped up the last tasty noodle, Miho brought by a bowl of soba-yu (broth) to combine with the remaining sauce.

Any reasonable person would have considered this the end of their meal, but I had to go one step further and order the highly recommended black sesame pudding. Although its dark-grey color was initially alarming, the rich flavor (somewhere between coffee and almond) immediately drew me in.

I'm already thinking about going back...

Soba Koh: 309 East 5th St., (212) 254-2244.