麺屋さん田 (Sanda in Kyoto)

0 Reviews

麺屋さん田

Creamy chicken broth with wholegrain wheat noodles are the draw at Sanda. The soup here is described as strong but not too intense. Although that is an overtly simple description, it seems to be the right one.

So many tsukemen shops have these little how-to-eat cards. Sanda’s is very detailed.

At first, eat three noodles by themselves.
Eat 3/4 of the noodles with the soup.
Eat the toppings by themselves and dip in the soup to compare the taste.
Soup wari.

Sanda omits any green, going for a purely brown bowl of noodles and soup. But oh what a brown it is. Thick-cut menma in the dark brown range. Low temperature cooked chicken in the beige. Noodles and a thick broth somewhere in between. Not a spec of green. The bit of green onion is still there though, in the form of aromatic oil in the soup.

Noodles are made in-house using Japanese wheat. This is a very good bowl of tsukemen. And though Kyoto has no shortage of creamy chicken soup, Sanda takes it a step further. It’s strong but not too intense.

The master Sanda-san (三田さん) at Sanda trained at Ippudo after leaving college in Kyoto. At that time, each shop in the Ippudo group was making their soup on-site, and his soup tended towards the strong side. It was only natural that he leave. Another former Ippudo ramen chef had opened Ginjo Ramen Kubota. Sanda-san joined up. He trained for seven years before going independent himself. Part of his training was doing limited bowls of toripaitan as well as noodle making.

Someday I’ll come back for their soupless tantanmen. You should probably try that soup on your first time though.

I would have had a second bowl on the spot, but I needed to save room for dinner.

A special matsutake mushroom course at one of Kyoto’s most revered restaurants. To be honest, though, that tsukemen at Sanda was the thing I remembered from this trip.

Go figure.

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