Soba — Japanese buckwheat noodles — is usually enjoyed cold with tsuyu, a dipping sauce made by adding soy sauce and mirin to dashi (Japanese soup stock). But at new hawker stall Reiwa Soba, you won’t find the traditional tsuyu on the menu. Instead, its signature dipping sauce is a house-made chicken, fish and seaweed dashi spiked with chilli oil, with the option of smashing in a gooey soft-boiled egg.

Reiwa Soba’s owner, Shinji Matsudaira, 36, came up with his proprietary sauce some 12 years ago. The Ehime native was working in Tokyo when he came across a soba shop whose chef-owner added chilli oil to the usual tsuyu dip, and was inspired to create his own concoction. “He was the first one to do it, but there are now a few soba shops in Tokyo which have tsuyu with spicy oil,” he says.

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And now, Shinji wants to share his “special dipping sauce” with his customers. “Nobody has this dipping sauce in Singapore. If people want to try the traditional dipping sauce, they will have to go to a traditional soba shop,” he avers.

His modern approach extends to his stall’s name. Reiwa Soba is named after the new era on Japan’s calendar (which started after the current Emperor Naruhito ascended the Chrysanthemum Throne in May 2019). According to Shinji, Reiwa is an apt name for his new business. He declares: “This is new taste, new generation.”

Shinji (left) moved to Singapore nine years ago with his wife, Ayana Matsudaira (right), 32, and their only son, now 10. They have since had three more kids here; two sons aged 7 and 4, plus a one-year-old daughter. They chose a tropical country for their relocation, as Shinji didn’t like the long winters in Japan. “One week of winter, okay. But too long, and it gets very hard to wake up in the morning,” he muses.

The couple doesn’t cook at their stall, though. Their soba is made from scratch on-site by a Thai cook (we will get to that in a bit). Shinji has a day job running his own bookkeeping company, while Ayana has a salon called Francapapi in Bedok, which specialises in herbal facials for problematic skin. “My oldest son has eczema and his digestion is not so good, which is why we use 100 percent buckwheat flour for our soba. It’s gluten-free and better for health-conscious people,” she tells 8days.sg.

The Matsudairas’ hawker stall soft-opened on August 15 this year. It’s located within a sleepy kopitiam along Kelantan Road, right next to a scenic section of the Rochor River. The location was attractive to Shinji. “Water is my element. I like to be near water,” he beams. A regular at the kopitiam, he frequented a Thai stall there and ended up befriending its Thai owner, Orawan (right), 52.

Covid-19 had gravely affected Orawan’s business, and she had considered giving up her stall. But Shinji thought of partnering with her to set up a new concept in the same space. “I have liked her food for a long time, so I suggested that we open a soba shop together, since soba goes well with my dipping sauce. I also wanted to keep some of her Thai food [on the menu], because I’m one of her fans,” he says.

Which explains why Reiwa Soba’s menu offers four types of soba, two of them influenced by Thai dishes: Chicken, Pork, Mango Salada and Soup of the Day (Thai-style green curry on the day of our visit). Prices range from $10 to $12, with the most expensive being the hormone-free pork option.

Instead of dried soba, which is usually not gluten-free as it contains some wheat flour, the 100 percent buckwheat flour soba here is made fresh by Orawan in the stall’s kitchen. She uses a $5,000 machine that Shinji and Ayana had specially imported from Akita, Japan. “This is why we opened a hawker stall. Buckwheat flour is very expensive, and we want to keep the cost low. If we open [our shop] in a mall, the costs will be too high,” says Ayana.

The buckwheat flour is kneaded into lumps with water before being dropped into the machine, which then squeezes out the noodle strands. Orawan lobs them off with a long knife, Fruit Ninja-style, and they drop straight into a vat of hot house-made bone broth. Once blanched, the noodles are immediately transferred to a tub of ice water, where they are chilled before being served naked with dipping sauce on the side.

We appreciate a good plate of freshly-made mori soba (served cold in a pile, on a plate). The best handmade ones we’ve had are tasty enough to enjoy on their own; the strands have a firm, chewy texture with a nutty earthiness from the buckwheat. Reiwa Soba’s version, being machine-made, is a tad limper, though it still boasts a lovely nutty aroma when eaten plain. Hoover your soba quickly — it hardens and clumps after just a few minutes. However the oily dashi dip, in which float pieces of chopped leeks, overpowers the delicate soba. You can request to omit the chilli oil. A simple bowl of tsuyu is good enough for the soba, along with the lean, clean slices of Spanish pork.

While the pork soba has pork slices draped over the noodles, the meat for the chicken soba is served as a few bite-sized pieces with the dipping sauce. We crack a soft-boiled egg into the sauce to make our meal more substantial, even though it overwhelms our soba.

On the day of our visit, soup of the day was green curry. “We also have bak kut teh soup and pork stomach soup sometimes,” a stall staff member tells us. The green curry, which is meant to be a dip, has a thinner consistency similar to prata curry. Instead of dipping our soba into the curry, we much prefer enjoying the two dishes separately. By itself, the homely green curry is flavourful, and redolent with the fragrant spices that go into it. But it’s too aggressive for the mild-mannered soba, like eating omakase sushi with sambal chilli. We find ourselves craving for a bowl of white rice, or even tang hoon, to soak up the rich gravy.

You can order Thai green mango salad as a side dish here ($4 for mini, $7 for regular, add $3 for tofu). Or you can have it on top of soba. The tangy mango salad with chilli padi makes a good appetiser, but its piquant feistiness doesn’t quite go with the nuanced, earthy flavour of soba.

PHOTOS: ALVIN TEO

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