Tanakaya

Over the last decade Tanakaya has served noodle lovers in Tustin, the standard formula for telling the story of the experience begins with a discussion of the long wait to get seated, continues with an extended wait for food to come out, then ends with a romanticized tale of a meal made extra special by either those waits or related pangs of hunger. In other words, good noodles make all the prior badness go away.

If the idea of waiting an hour for a good plate of Japanese soba or udon strikes you as potentially exciting, Tanakaya is the place to do it. Once you’re seated in their moderately sized, minimalistic dining room – notably just around the corner from smaller Japanese restaurant Cream Pan and larger Honda-Ya – you can choose from a nice list of soups and tsukemen-style cold dips to enjoy either standard noodles or matcha soba, the latter in limited quantities, seemingly to generate additional discussion and demand. We found their cold soba with hot duck dipping broth to be a particularly interesting combination in concept, though not equally compelling in flavor.