Echigo Soba

Echigo Soba is one of our favorite places for soba. It's located about a block east of Yokosuka Chuo station. If you were to walk out Womble gate and keep walking straight down that road, I think you'd end up in front of it.

Echigo storefront

Echigo soba is small place, having 5 or so tables upstairs and maybe another 4 downstairs. We've always found the set meals here really good.  For the set meals you usually have your choice of the type of soba and that can be seen in the translated menu below.  Open for lunch and dinner.

Misaki Tuna bowl set - (breaded and fully cooked)

Their website is here but I found it agonizingly slow. It has pictures inside as well as their menu offerings.

Shrimp Tempura set lunch

You can see the little black plate on the bottom right. There are onions and then two other items on the plate. The two other items were a mystery and I thought they made a mistake in "loading up" the condiments. Just one little twig of that yellow thing? :-)  I asked about it and forgot what they said it was, but you just add it to the soba if you want.

There lunch menu is shown above.  The top photo on the menu shows the katsu tuna bowl and the other 5 choices are in the lower pictures.
A few clarifications in the "choose soba" section:
- Kake soba means soba (buckwheat noodles) in hot broth.
- Nori or seaweed will likely be the shredded dried type
- 南蛮 Nanban - Literally means southern barbarian. In the past this referred the Portugese being the first traders with Japan and they came from the south. The word Nanban supposedly originated in China where all foreigners were referred to as nanban or southern barbarians. In cooking however, it refers to spices. Although it's hard to pin down exactly, nanban mainly refers to ginger, leeks, red pepper, and maybe garlic or vinegar. Could be some or all of them. I put meat and onions because that was one of the other explanations I found. You will see Nanban on many many menus in Japan.
- Seiro is a wooden bamboo serving tray
- Nori Seiro combines the nori and the seiro
- The niku seiro will have the soba on the bamboo tray with a bowl of meat and broth on the side (I think)

This website link has a lot of photos and explanations of soba dishes that are on the menus below. It's easier to picture it than for me to explain it. You can also see and learn a lot of the soba lingo by checking the Wikipedia page on it. Check out the blog map for location.

Tight spaces!

Map and chopstick envelope

Rotate to the right for Japanese (and disregard any typos)

March seasonal menu

 This is the drink menu and "ala carte" menu. No translation provided, but you should be able to pick out quite a bit using the key food kanji page as well as the previous menus from this restaurant.
You should see soft drinks, sours (test yourself and see if you can find lemon sour), beer, buckwheat sochu, barley sochu, awamori, chestnut sochu, and various sake in the drink section.
You should be able to pick out fried chicken, yakitori, shrimp tempura in the food section.