Otafuku Restaurant
The kikouchi is pure Nagano buckwheat with no wheat to hold it together, and the kitchen makes ten servings at lunch and ten at dinner.
Why go
Three sobas, milled three ways. Zaru is the light brown noodle off a buckwheat blend. Seiro is white, cut from flour refined out of the first milling, and LA Weekly called it chewy yet silken. Kikouchi is the dark one, 100 percent buckwheat from Nagano.1
The kikouchi is where the craft sits. Most soba carries a little wheat flour as a binder, and without it there is no gluten holding the noodle together. Making pure buckwheat soba is an art form, as the lack of gluten requires a true craft to come up with something that holds together.
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The kitchen makes ten servings at lunch and ten at dinner. Call before you drive.1 That was the LA Weekly's advice in September 2017, which is also the last time anybody wrote about this kitchen.
Order this / avoid
- Order: the kikouchi if any is left, the seiro if not.1
- Order: it cold, on the bamboo tray, and finish the way the shop sets you up to: pour the soba cooking water into what is left of your dipping sauce and drink it.1
- Avoid: a late lunch. The kikouchi runs out first.
What locals & experts say
- LA Weekly, 5 September 2017:
While there are plenty of places around L.A. to get soba, thin Japanese noodles made from buckwheat flour, one name comes up first and foremost: Otafuku.
1 - Same piece, on the seiro:
Chewy yet silken, with the slightly earthy flavor of buckwheat, these are the Rolls-Royce of the noodle world.
1
Good to know
- The dashi: built on bonito imported from Kyoto, for the hot soba.1
- Getting there: South Western Avenue in Gardena, in an older building on the strip.1
Verdict
listed — The kikouchi is the reason this place is on the list: a soba cut from 100 percent Nagano buckwheat with no wheat flour to bind it, which is the hard version and the reason a shop makes twenty servings a day rather than a hundred. LA Weekly called the seiro chewy and silken and put Otafuku first among the county's soba shops in 2017. That is the whole record. Nothing published since has said whether the room still trades, so the rung sits at the bottom on evidence rather than on cooking, and it should move the moment somebody confirms the door is open.