Sobar - Review - Culver City - Los Angeles - The Infatuation
"Sobar lives on a sleepy Centinela corner, and you might walk past it thinking it’s a boutique selling incense. But inside is a setting tailor-made for a peaceful meal, with lo-fi music humming in the background and blank canvases on the wall that nearly put you in a trance. The most pressing decision you’ll have to make at this temple of calm is how you’d like your delicate soba, which Sobar makes from pure buckwheat, producing rustic-looking noodles that are nuttier and more flavorful than the kind blended with flour. The best way to enjoy them is to get the chilled noodles—either as dipping noodles with a choose-your-own-sauce sidecar like traditional tsuyu or spicy sesame, or the maze noodles topped with ribeye or deep-fried scallops that you pour cold broth over. Ordering the soba in warm soup does let you appreciate their buckwheatiness, but they tend to turn soft in their hot tub if you don’t eat them quickly. There are also solid small plates like karaage and spicy tuna crispy rice, plus a selection of sake bottles that are neatly arranged on the shelves. But all of that comes secondary to slurping fresh soba in a room that asks little of you (besides $20 for a bowl of noodles). photo credit: Cathy Park Food Rundown Crispy Tuna Grab Sushi As the name suggests, you should grab these hefty chunks with your hands. They come with sheets of nori, but the bites have enough going for them without the arts and crafts of wrapping them up. photo credit: Cathy Park Ribeye Niku Soba This has all the greatest hits of our personal food pyramid: noodles, broth, and meat. A server pours chilled broth over sliced ribeye, sweet onions, and soba noodles tableside, and the best part is mixing it all up with the cartoonishly orange yolk from the poached egg. photo credit: Cathy Park Spicy Garlic Enoki Soba This bowl of noodles functions like a warm compress. It’s topped with fried bundles of enoki mushrooms that are tied up like they’re about to be sacrificed. Unlike cold soba dishes where the noodles have bounce to them, the heat in this one basically steam-softens them, so they’re unfortunately not as chewy and slurpable. photo credit: Cathy Park" - Cathy Park
