Mutsuko Soma: Serving Sake and Soba in Seattle
The traditional shokunin, soba-making side of Mutsuko Soma. All photos courtesy of Mutsuko Soma.
The answer is simple: because to do that, I’d have to move to the Fremont neighborhood of Seattle, were the Tochigi Prefecture native is now based. Since my physical life is already fractured enough, I will just tell you about who Soma is and what she’s doing in her corner of the country.
First, she was selected as one of Food & Wine’s 10 best new chefs in 2019, and a semi-finalist for the James Beard Foundation’s Best Chef: Northwest that same year. Seventeen years earlier, in 2002, she arrived in Seattle to enroll in the two-year culinary arts program at the Art Institute of Seattle. “Back then my mind was Japanese, filled with soy sauce and miso,” she recalls. “I wanted to go somewhere that didn’t use those ingredients so much, where I could learn French, Italian, or Mexican cooking.” But when she discovered that buckwheat is grown in Washington state, she began dreaming of opening her own soba restaurant in Seattle.
Soma’s favorite soba: kamonegi (duck and scallion), for which her restaurant is named.
Soba was a dish she knew well, having grown up on her grandmother’s delicious, hand-rolled, hand-cut soba. “We never had dried soba, which tastes completely different,” she says. She only knew her grandmother’s springy, nutty fresh noodles made with buckwheat that she grew and milled herself. The problem, though, was that Soma had never learned to make it, and apprenticing with her grandmother was not in the cards—her technique was “super unique,” because she had lost one arm in an accident. As a workaround, she jury-rigged special equipment and invented her own way of making soba.
So in 2009, Soma enrolled in a two-month soba-making program in Tokyo geared toward professional cooks. She loved learning the craft of milling the buckwheat, calibrating its water content to the day’s humidity level, building her bonito-based dashi and rolling, folding, and cutting the noodles. “It’s like making origami, it uses the same way of folding,” she explains.
Interior, Kamonegi.
Soma returned to Seattle in 2011, opening a place called Miyabi 45 and then Kamonegi in 2017. The community around her North 39th Street shop took to her soba in such a big way that the long lines for a seat prompted her to open 20-seat Hannyatou in 2019. A snack and a glass of sake, she reasoned, would help ease customers’ wait. “It’s like a bar in Japan with the seats so close together that all the guests become friends,” says Soma, who also holds an international kikisakeshi certification.
For her menu, she turned her focus to fermented foods, making her own miso, tsukemono pickles, shio-koji, and sake lees-marinated cheese—all fitting pairings for sake. Her sake kasu, or lees, come from local sake brewery Tahoma Fuji. Her changing sake list might feature labels such as Heiwa Shuzo’s Kid junmai ginjo hiyaoroshi, Ippongi Shuzou’s Denshin Aki junmai nama genshu or Kinoshita Shuzo’s Ice Breaker nama junmai ginjo. And I love the restaurant’s winking tagline/Japanese accent reference, “Drink Sake, Stay Soba.”
Her own personal favorite breweries include Yucho Shuzo, maker of Kaze no Mori, Senkin Shuzo, and Kamoizumi Shuzo. She’ll pair Kaze no Mori muroka nama genshu with ankimo (monkfish liver) and truffle ponzu, or Kamoizumi’s two-year aged nama Red Maple with a rich dish like buta kakuni (braised pork belly), chicken wings, or her sake-kasu marinated cheddar.
One reason for the success of her restaurants is the neighborhood’s transformation from sleepy residential enclave to a diverse community of tech workers and families, including “a lot of wine and beer nerds who are always looking for something unique and new,” Soma says.
Nama Club pairing: Otokoyama and pork floss furikake cream cheese.
To cater to this clientele, she started a Nama Club, which offers subscribers three 720-millileter bottles of nama, each paired with a dish of Soma’s own creation. As soon as a new bottle arrives, she’ll announce the new offering, so there is no fixed time period for the $120 subscription. Her last pairing was an Otokoyama namazume arabishiri with pork floss furikake-coated cream cheese.
As a chef, says Soma, “One part of me is a super-traditional artisan, but the other side is fun and creative. I like to challenge myself.” So at Hannyatou, you might find peanuts boiled in ramen seasoning and garlic; Spam and chicken liver mousse topped with ramen furikake and served with crackers, or her favorite shift drink, the Umami-Chelada, made with shiitake and konbu “clamato” and beer, in a glass rimmed with shichimi pepper.
Last fall’s Hannyatou hiyaoroshi lineup.
Soma’s kooky side unleashed: her prize-winning Cup Noodle okonomiyaki.
The countless riffs on instant ramen in Soma’s repertoire stem from her participation in the 2000 and 2021 Nissin Cup Noodles competition, winning her $50,000 in prize money for her version of okonomiyaki using Cup Noodles. When the Covid-19 pandemic hit, her experimentation was a way to keep busy and creating. If anything, her problem, Soma laments, is that “I make too many creations.” But this gives her a catalog of dishes that she can draw from for her Nama Club and restaurant pairings.
She’s putting that Cup Noodle prize money into another passion, small cooking gear for camping, with which she can do more cooking experimentation, like this one using a camping-friendly waffle maker. Instant ramen and yakisoba, day-old donuts, they’re all fodder for fun. Working with affordable ingredients is a point of pride, and the same goes for her sake selections: one of her dessert inventions is a matcha nigori affogato made with Kizakura Shuzo’s matcha nigori, a bottle that won’t break the bank but is made with quality Kyoto Uji matcha.
It’s safe to say that for a chef whose motto is “always challenge accepted,” we can expect to see a continued flow of new and interesting projects. One of those might even be a Japanese pizza restaurant. Soma has come up with a name that lives up to her kooky, creative, and hybrid oeuvre: she’s calling it “Pizzakaya.”
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