Self-serve Udon Slurpdown: Kagawa-ya Udon Noodle Company Versus Marugame Udon and Tempura

Image from Gurunavi -- learn about Udon the fun way

With the arrival of a branch of Japanese mega-chain Marugame Udon (990 stores, including 786 in Japan) at Stonestown Galleria, San Francisco now boasts two "self-serve" udon restaurants, including the local independent Kagawa-ya Udon at 1455 Market St. (known to some as "The Uber Building"). The "Grand Opening" of Marugame  (after a month-long "soft" opening) this week spurred me to catch up with Kagawa-ya, which had the bad taste of holding its grand opening last Spring while I was out of the country (slurping noodles in Shanghai) and atthe same time do do a quickie comparison between the two.

The two restaurants have several things in common, including, of course, "self-serve" (cafeteria-like) dining.  This involves ordering your noodle choice (and bowl size, if applicable) and sliding your tray down the track to choose additional toppings/sides (mostly of a tempura nature) while your bowl is being prepared. Kagawa-ya offers seven different bowls of udon, Marugame 10. (I won't go into udon esoterica, not even to tell you about bukkake udon, but you can learn a lot here). Both have a variety of tempura (nine for Marugame, a"variety" for Kagawa-ya -- I didn't count them) including a potato croquette  For additional sides, Marugame offers four varieties of musubi, plus inari. Kagawa-ya offers Spam musubi (reflecting the chef-owner's Hawaii origins) plus onigiri.

Both Kagaway-ya and Marugame specialize in sanuki udon (udon with a square cross-section), and both venues make them in-house.

1. Kagawa-ya Udon Noodle Company

First up was Kagawa-ya. An upside of being away when it opened, is that any opening day story I might have essayed would have ended up in the long shadow cast by the prodigious coverage by Japanese-American food blogger Foohoe (Sandy Wada).  Read it and become her fan here. Note,  though, as she acknowledged, her meal was comped.

Kagawa-ya was forlornly empty when I arrived, just before 1:45 on a chilly Tuesday afternoon and placed an order for the dish I hoped would be useful for comparison with Marugame's fare, Niku (beef) Udon (described on the menu as "Soy braised sliced beef, sweet onions, green onions, ginger and toasted sesame seeds").  As my noodles were being prepared, I slid my tray down to the tempura section and picked a shrimp tempura and a potato croquette as add-ons. Somehow I missed the step where I could have had the woman behind the counter add a soft-boiled egg, which would have made my bowl more comparable to what I was contemplating ordering at Marugame.

The ingredients promised by the menu came in a slightly, but not offensively, sweet (dashi?) broth, whose sweetness appeared to come from the onions.  The coarsely shredded beef was the weakest part of the dish, being overly chewy and not particularly flavorful. The restaurant's headliner, udon noodles, were nearly perfectly chewy, though teetering a bit towards over-cooked, perhaps due to the lateness of my lunch hour. The two pieces of tempura I selected were as expected, though the potato croquette was peculiarly limp, as if underdone.

A bit of sticker shock will hit you at the register at Kagawa-ya; my bowl of noodles and two pieces of  tempura came to $17.20 before tax & tip (there is a tip jar). Had I found and added the egg I craved, it would have been over $20 with tax, steep for lunch (unless you happen to be part of the gray hoodie target market).

2. Marugame Udon and Tempura

Compared to the loneliness of Kagawa-ya on a Tuesday afternoon, Marugame Udon was a veritable happening upon my Friday visit. Arriving at 2:25 PM, I joined a serpentine line outside Marugame's new digs at Stonestown Galleria, not in the food court, but at street-level between Olive Garden and Chipotle. The vast majority of the cheerfully anticipatory crowd were college-aged (and some high school-aged) Asians. 

Thirty-five minutes after getting in line, I was able to place my order for a large bowl of Nikutama Udon ("Served with Sweet Flavored Beef, Soft  Boiled Egg, and Kake Sauce." and proceeded to the tempura station where I selected, as I had at Kagawa-ya, a shrimp tempura and a potato croquette.  Once you've paid for your order, there is another station with free toppings, such as spring onion, cilantro, wasabi, ginger and tempura flakes. I added sparingly from this bar because I wanted to appreciate the flavor as prepared by the chef.

Marugame, unlike Kagawa-ya offers two bowl sizes,"regular" and "large." For comparative purposes, the "large" Marugame bowl appeared to be larger than the Kagawa-ya bowl, if only marginally so. The contents turned out to be quite different, particularly the "sweet" beef in Marugame's bowl. It was sliced much thinner than that of Kagawa-ya's and, as advertised, was sweet, very sweet, cloyingly so, as if it had been candied.  Oddly, the broth itself did not seem to pick up this sweetness, as it seemed less sweet than the broth in Kagawa-ya's niku udon. Other than the difference in sweetness, the broths seemed similar, perhaps both  were of the Kansai dashi variety (hey, I'm learning!). The noodles themselves were perfection, chewy without being overly firm or mushy. The "soft boiled" (actually poached) egg was an additional blessing.

Cash register comparison? Not even close.  My beef noodles with an egg and two similar pieces of tempura came to $13.60 before T&T at Marugame.

An Eater Los Angeles article proclaims that "Marugame Udon Might Be the Most Authentic Japanese Restaurant in LA" in the sense, I suppose, that McDonald's might be the most authentic American Restaurant in Tokyo. You might, in fact, get the impression that you are actually in Japan, especially if, like me, you've never been there. 

Where slurped: Kagawa-ya Udon, 1455 Market St., San Francisco; Marugame Udon, Stonestown Galleria, San Francisco

A Soba-ring NewYear's Eve Nabeyaki at Dojima-ann

Clever wordplay, eh? Actually I was sober as a judge when I downed the nabeyaki soba at Dojima-ann, and expect to be in the same state long after Anderson Cooper's last giggle of the evening takes air.  The eating of soba, the nutty-flavored buckwheat noodles, is a New Year's Eve tradition in Japan, but as far as I know has nothing to do with lining one's stomach for a night of hard drinking (something Japanese salarymen are alleged to do every night).

In doing my research (a.k.a. Googling) for the best places to eat soba, I came across Dojima-ann, one of those places that flies under the radar because it's right under our noses (at O'Farrell and Powell Streets). Dojima-ann's menu offers 15 hot noodle soups (and another 6 cold noodle dishes), each with a choice of udon or soba noodles. It being close to dinner time when I arrived there, I decided to go for the nabeyaki, a meal in itself, along with a side of gyoza.

Nabeyaki (a.k.a. nabe-yaki) is a form of hot pot, a one-dish meal served in an iron pot or clay pot on cold winter days.  It's more commonly found with udon noodles than soba, but that goes out the window on New Year's Eve. In Dojima-ann's version, chewy soba noodles are served in a rich miso broth, along with (as specified on the restaurant's menu) chicken, egg and vegetables topped with shrimp tempura.  The chicken came in tender, not over-cooked shreds, accompanied by scalloped carrot slices, mushrooms, Beijing cabbage, nori (seaweed) and various greens. The raw egg was broken onto the top of the broth which already contained the chicken, leaving no doubt as to which came first on this occasion.  The single  large shrimp tempura was as tasty as it was decorative, and the miso broth's savoriness was multiplied by the contributions of the ingredients that essentially "cooked" in while I waited for it to cool to a slurpable temperature.

The six gyoza in my side dish, though on the smallish side, were intensely flavorful, and a well-recommended protein add-on.  I wanted to try the potato croquettes, but judging from the menu, they are only available with the curry udon or as a bento box item.

Dojima-ann, from all accounts (including my own limited sample) serves decent Japanese fare at reasonable prices, and is very conveniently located once you know it is there.  I'v probably passed it a hundred times on the Geary bus without noticing it, obscured as it is by throngs of tourists in the street.  I'll definitely return to vet the udon, as well as to enjoy some non-noodular menu items.

Where slurped: Dojima-ann, 219 O'Farrell St. at Powell St., San Francisco

A Bay Area Treasure Lost: Wenzhou Fish, Noodles & More.... Is No More.

Knock Knock, who's there?  Knocked Fish Noodle Soup.

As I write this, I know of only two restaurants in the U.S. serving the cuisine of Wenzhou, China. Golden Corner Noodles in Flushing, Queens, New York, and Wenzhou Fish, Noodles & More in San Jose's Japantown. By the time you read this, most likely, one of the two will be gone; alas, it will be the one in San Francisco's neighbor to the South.

Wenzhou is a Chinese city in Zhejiang Province, which is immediately south of Shanghai.  Located in a coastal enclave, it was historically isolated from the rest of China, and thus developed a distinct sea-food based culinary culture, as well as a dialect of the Wu language that is unintelligible to even its nearest neighbors. Wenzhou's significance in the context of Chinese food, a well as the rarity of its cuisine in the Chinese diaspora are well documented by an article by Jacqueline M. Newman in Flavor and Fortune.

Wenzhou Fish, Noodles and More* was opened in late 2016 by the husband and wife team of Max Soloviev and Carol Chen after sinking $2 million into renovating a historic building in San Jose's Japantown.  I filed this intelligence in my memory banks for possible future action then forgot about it, understandable because downtown San Jose is a place I had visited perhaps twice in the 50+ years I have lived in San Francisco.  Visiting the restaurant became a matter of some urgency, though, when news came through a couple of months ago that the restaurant would be closing at the end of the year. I am carless (and not even a driver), so when my daughter arrived in town for a Christmas visit we rented a car and trekked to San Jose (combining the restaurant visit with a visit to the San Jose Museum of Art, which had an exhibit she wanted to see.

At Wenzhou Fish, Noodles and More, I ordered two iconic Wenzhou dishes, "Wenzhou Silky Knocked Fish Noodle Soup" (温州敲鱼面) and a "Wenzhou Style Stuffed Pita With Dried Vegetables & Ground Pork" (梅菜干麦饼) to share with my daughter who, being somewhat averse to wheatens, ordered a more conventional fried rice dish for herself. The "Knocked Fish" is so-called because a "dough" of fish flesh scraped from the skin combined with a little potato starch is knocked into a thin, flat mass with a wooden dowel, lightly pan fried, rolled up and cut into into translucent ribbons with bits of fish visible. This slow-loading (but worth waiting for) video shows a woman in Wenzhou making the "knocked" fish noodles.

In Wenzhou FN&M the fish noodles are combined with some fresh conventional wheat noodles and vegetables in a savory fish-based broth. I found this dish refreshing, almost addictively so, and a good counterpoint to the fiery Sichuan and spicy Xi'an soups I have taken to in recent years. The Wenzhou "pita" is. I discovered, a common street snack in Wenzhou. The dried (actually pickled) vegetsbles in the rendition we were served did not overwhelm the ground pork as it might have, and both I and my daughter (who is far from the committed carnivore that I am) both enjoyed this.

While we were dining, co-owner Carol Chen was conversing with a woman at the next table in the Wenzhou dialect. I can normally pick up on Shanghainese and other Wu dialects almost instantly, but even straining to listen to the conversation, could not recognize a single word in the Wenzhouhua.

Co-owner Carol Chen

I talked to owner Chen afterwards about the closure. She said business was good, but not good enough to support the overhead of such a labor-intensive operation as her restaurant. She and her husband are not throwing in the towel, though, and are looking for another suitable venue. She mentioned that someone in San Francisco had inquired about operating a franchise, and they had begun to think in terms of a central kitchen to support more than one location.

Will opportunity knock more than once for knocked fish noodles in the Bay Area?

 Where slurped:  Wenzhou Fish, Noodles and More, 625 North 6th St,, San Jose

*I suspect the comma is an unintended intruder; most Chinese restaurants have fish and noodles, but very few have fish noodles.