PICTURE this: It's hot outside, that particular kind of hot that you seem to find only in late summer in Southern California. The sky is beige, and the air seems so thick you nearly swim through it. Even after you're inside the air-conditioned restaurant, you feel the residue on your skin. But there in front of you is a reed mat. Piled in a rough tangle on top is a low mound of pale buckwheat noodles; there's a scattering of dark green slivers of toasted seaweed on top and a small cup of tea-colored liquid next to it.
You gather a mouthful of noodles on your chopsticks and dip just the trailing strands into the liquid. Then you slurp down the noodles with a flourish. The first thing you notice is a cool moistness -- the traces of leftover cooking water still clinging to the strands. Then comes the subtly earthy, slightly mushroom-y taste of the noodle itself. Finally you get the salty, complex whip of the dipping sauce.
Can you imagine anything more refreshing or satisfying?
Soba -- in Japanese the word refers to the buckwheat plant, the flour that is ground from it, the noodle it is made into and even the whole slurpy ritual of eating it -- is a mainstay of summertime eating for many in Southern California. You can find it on menus in almost every Japanese restaurant that isn't strictly a sushi bar.
But when people who really know soba want to eat it, they head to a nondescript block of Western Avenue in Gardena, where Seiji Akutsu crafts handmade soba at his tiny Otafuku restaurant.
Otafuku's small dining room ("minimalist" would be a polite description of the decor) always seems jammed. And it seems that at every place there sits a plate of soba.
Springy texture
WHAT makes Akutsu's noodles so remarkable is the texture. They almost feel alive in your mouth, they are so springy to the bite. You could say they were chewy, but that might connote a certain toughness, and after the first bite these turn positively silky.
That quality can only come from freshly made noodles. While there are hundreds of places in Southern California that serve soba, there are only a few that take the trouble to make it fresh.
"Once you've had Otafuku's soba, there's no sense going anyplace else," says Kazuto Matsusaka, chef at Culver City's booming Beacon restaurant. Matsusaka, who was chef at Chinois on Main for 10 years, says he and his wife Vicki Fan used to make regular pilgrimages to Otafuku before their restaurant got so busy.
"We'd go to exercise, then head down to Marukai to go shopping," he says. "And we'd stop at Otafuku for lunch. We'd do that two or three times a month. I really like it for dinner, too, when he makes all those special small plates to go with the noodles.
"Now because of running this restaurant, I haven't been in a couple of months," he says wistfully. "They really are the best."
You might expect noodles like this to come from the hands of some Zen soba master, a craftsman who has dedicated his life to perfecting the art of coaxing buckwheat into noodles.
That's not exactly the way it happened for 61-year-old Akutsu: He has been making soba for all of eight years. The son of a family who arranged special events for the Japanese royal court, Akutsu came to this country for the first time on a tourist visa in the mid-'60s.
He decided to stay and attend language school, but extending his visa made him eligible for the draft. So, in 1968, he was called up into the United States Army and served for two years during the Vietnam War.
When his commitment was completed, he returned to Japan and went to work in the family business. Eventually, that got old, so he decided to go out on his own, opening a yakitori restaurant in a building the family owned.
"I decided to cook yakitori because it seemed like something anyone could do," he says. "It was easy to begin."
That business closed when the Japanese economy collapsed in the late '80s. He returned to the U.S., this time to open a soba restaurant. "There weren't many soba places here," he recalls, "and Japanese people eat soba every day."
For Otafuku he chose a spot across the street from the Japanese restaurant where he had waited tables in 1966.
His mind made up and the spot rented, he set about learning his craft, teaching himself to make noodles. "I made mucho soba," he says.
Soba flour comes in several grades depending on how polished the grain is before it is ground. Akutsu imports all of his flour from Japan and has it delivered every two months. For most of his noodles he uses the No. 2 grade, or the third-lightest.
But the soba the purists seek out at Otafuku is made from the most highly polished flour, called \o7sarashina \f7after an area of Japan where soba is especially popular. It is nearly pure white and was traditionally served only to the royal court.
Akutsu calls this noodle \o7seiro\f7 and the regular noodle \o7zaru\f7 after the traditional woven steamer basket and plate.
A simple aesthetic
