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Where Kaiseki meets Fermentation: Experimental Washoku & Soba in Azabu-Juban at Hidden Gem Restaurant Honda

Update-Date: Apr 20, 2026

Author: Sydney Seekford

Categories: Kaiseki Soba Japanese Cuisine Sashimi/ Seafood

Where Kaiseki meets Fermentation: Experimental Washoku & Soba in Azabu-Juban at Hidden Gem Restaurant Honda

Honda Azabu-juban can be summed up in one word: eclectic. Its owner and mastermind, Chef Honda, is a sommelier, soba-artisan, and distinctly quirky guy wrapped in a cool chef package. For more than a decade, he has taken on independent challenges and devised menus that express his personality for guests’ enjoyment. In its current iteration, Chef Honda’s fermentation-forward course menu reinterprets Japanese food with creativity and confidence, blending classics with unexpected details that don’t fail to delight.

Sydney Seekford

Gourmet Creator

American living in Japan since 2022. Food writer and gourmet content creator for Japan’s most well known food media. Founder of menu translation and language support service MENUWIZ. Work history includes copywriting for booking platforms, video and media production and appearances, and consulting in F&B for household brands. Passionate about regional revitalization and slow tourism with a focus on local food culture.

Intro

Azabujuban is a neighborhood tourists don’t know and expats know all too well. Its funky mixture of blue collar services, residential housing, corporate buildings, and hidden restaurants – all with not a decorative tower or cute dog statue in sight – keep the very regular neighborhood of “juban” off of most sight-seeing guides. This leaves Azabujuban open to interpretation and experimentation, not unlike the mad-science-esque jars that occupy most of Honda’s flat surfaces.

We visited to get an inside look at Honda’s seasonal omakase course. While we enjoyed a wide range of high-quality Japanese seafood, hand-cut soba, Hida beef and clay-pot rice, chef Honda explained the fine points of his philosophy and approach to fermentation in creating a creative course that excites all the way to dessert.

honda Azabujuban Branch

Open: [Weekdays, Saturdays, National Holidays] Dinner 6:00 pm - 1:00 am (last entry at 12:00 am)
Closed: Sunday
Average price: [Dinner] 10,000 JPY
Access: 5-minute walk from Azabu-juban Station (Exit 7) on the Toei Oedo Line
Address: 2F-2, DKNS Azabu, 2-8-3, Azabujuban, Minato-ku, Tokyo Map
More Details Reservation

Ferments for the Win

Shelves of wine and ferments

Trot up the stairs and open the door to be greeted immediately by a narrow corridor packed in one one side by a wine fridge and on the other by a shelf of homemade ferments. Among them, kombuchas with suspended citrus halves and mysterious jars of liquid ranging from pale and cloudy to vibrantly orange.

The specimen collection extends onto the counter, where clearly labeled containers note the contents and bottling date. Mr. Honda, Chef-owner of both Honda Azabujuban and Honda Akasaka, explains that despite appearances, he’s only been working on home-made ferments for about a year, not even long enough to have produced a cooking-ready batch of miso.

Nowadays, the food world often looks to names like Alchemist and Noma, those Danish bastions of boundary-pushing culinary innovation, whenever the topic of fermentation comes up. But for Chef, the inspiration to create his own lactic-acid ferments was much more quiet and personal. He didn’t read some inspiring tome about new-age cooking and didn’t even seem too excited about the Danes when asked if he too, had joined the wave of fermentation-forward chefs thanks to their contributions. According to Chef Honda, a guest from London simply gave him the idea while dining at his counter.

Despite being a relatively new addition to Honda’s repertoire (the restaurant has been in business for 13 years), the menu has come to rely heavily on the magic of fermentation for its intense flavor profiles.

Japanese Food with Unapologetic Personality

Dried bluefin tuna dashi makes an impactful first sip

Chef Honda describes his cooking as “creative Japanese food”, and for someone who has only left his home country twice, he has managed to create a menu that would feel right at home in a wa-fusion restaurant in New York. The fermentation styles used are largely associated with Western cuisine, and even the Japanese elements get unique treatments, like the use of a tuna dashi as well as the classic bonito one for a more impactful first sip of umami-rich broth.

The flavors throughout the course are intense, often salt and umami forward. The delicacy of washoku, those parts that root the menu in Japanese food, is more evident in plating and ingredient quality. Highlighting the effects of fermentation inherently eclipses the philosophy of “let the ingredient speak for itself,” making the meal feel heartier than its classical kaiseki appearance would lead diners to expect.

A pool of amazake featuring sakura powder, caviar, shiso flowers, shellfish, and spring vegetables.

A standout course is the amazake-based hassun of sorts. It’s not technically a hassun, and the course isn’t designed to mimic kaiseki exactly, but having familiar washoku touchpoints in form and function eases diners into the strong forces at work. This dish changes through the seasons, as is typical of Japanese courses, but always uses a homemade amazake base.

The appearance of the spring version contrasts bright orange kuruma-shrimp with dried sakura powder and the creamy yellow of fermented white asparagus, all of which rest in grass-green asparagus amazake. Amazake itself is a fermented rice soup/drink, often served warm in winter to fortify chilly bodies. Here, its natural sweetness compliments the shrimp, while cushioning the impact of the deliciously cheesy white asparagus tip. Using lactic fermentation turns the simple white asparagus into a briny, crispy bite, almost parmesan-esque in its nuttiness.

One of the most deceptive dishes is Honda’s springtime tsukuri. Its appearance is based on classic sashimi plating, and the use of whitefish is similarly traditional. However, the thinly sliced fish sits in an intensely salty, citrussy ferment that takes the place of soy sauce and ponzu. A little goes a long way, but the creativity is remarkable. Notably, Chef Honda uses fresh fish, not aged. It’s a subtle but important aspect of his menu, because it signifies that while fermentation is an important part of the chef’s creative process, it is not the only thing he’s thinking about.

Made with Health in Mind

Throughout the meal, the chef’s choices show that he prefers leaner cuts of meat and tuna over the popular marbled selections. At occasion restaurants choosing to incorporate beef and bluefin, using exquisitely marbled A5 wagyu and succulent melt-in-your-mouth fatty tuna has become status quo.

However, chef Honda says that while it's partly an expression of his personal preferences, he also chooses to serve lean tuna and beef tenderloin because his course is built with healthfulness as a guiding principle. Using leaner cuts is better suited to the fermented sauces and flavorings he pairs with each course, and the two both support diner wellbeing.

One of the most popular courses among international visitors is an akami (lean) tuna and cauliflower tar-tar swimming in egg-yolk sauce infused with homemade shrimp garum. Bearing similarity to both yukke and tuna tar-tar, it’s an interesting dish with subtleties that make it hard to put your chopsticks down.

Hand cut moringa soba noodles

The same is true regarding one of the restaurant’s signature dishes, its hand kneaded and knife-cut moringa soba, an original take on Japan’s traditional tea-infused buckwheat noodles, cha-soba. The soba flour base is a classic Tokyo 2-8 soba, which becomes a mossy green with the introduction of moringa powder.

Moringa is often called a superfood. It’s high in antioxidants, fights inflammation and supports the GI system, and some studies show that it may have potential in cancer and weight loss treatments. Fans of matcha will find that the moringa flavor is not dissimilar – also grassy and bitter, with a forest-y aftertaste. In a word, it tastes healthy, a great match for earthy buckwheat.

Before each service, Chef Honda kneads and cuts the moringa soba by hand. Unlike extruded soba, hand-cut noodles feature a wider, rectangular shape, perfect for holding onto the uni sauce they’re dressed with. During spring, the soba is served chilled, accompanied by firefly squid and peas for texture. The fresh noodles, served al dente, toe the line between pasta and Japanese noodles in texture. Some guests even request to try them simply with tsuyu for a more direct experience.

honda Azabujuban Branch

Two chefs, one counter

Left: Kobayashi, Right: Honda

Over his 20-plus year career, Chef Honda has polished his skills in a variety of disciplines, not just fermentation, but also wine, Japanese cuisine and yakitori. He worked at a soba restaurant as a young man, a legacy he conveys through his mastery over traditional soba-making techniques.

While Mr. Honda admits making it by hand is a workout and time consuming, he’s a personal fan of soba, and considers it an important part of his identity as a chef. By serving the dish that helped shape his career, the chef shares pieces of his personality and story with each guest, whether they know it or not.

Although Chef Honda is the owner and mastermind behind Honda Azabujuban’s creative menu, he shares the counter with Head Chef Kobayashi. Chef Kobayashi began working at Honda as a part-timer, introduced by one of his friends. Originally pursuing a career in music, he easily drew parallels between the artistry of creating food and music, and cooking became a passion. In his own words, Chef Honda creates the plans and Chef Kobayashi is tasked with giving them life.

A Unique Beverage Menu

Chef Honda is a certified sommelier, and his personal quirks even come out in his drink choices. For example, the chef is perfectly content to recommend guests start their meal with a domestic red, particularly during a la carte hours, which start at 8:30 pm. Home made kombuchas and wellness-forward drinks, as well as a selection of regional sakes, are also recommended.

While the walls of the restaurant pay homage to California’s wine regions, using maps of the state as decor, Chef Honda actually harbors a strong passion for orange (largely Australian) and domestic wines. Considering this is a chef who finds ways to sneak funky original ferments into nearly every dish, these preferences come as no surprise.

The hallmarks of natural and orange wines are effortless fits for his cuisine. Likewise, the adoption of domestic grapes – Chef Honda highlights the soy sauce notes present in some Japanese wines as particularly appealing – represents a bold choice that, like his dishes, fuse Japanese and western sensibilities and embrace novelty.

An Eclectic Corner of Azabujuban

Honda Azabujuban, styled as hOnda on official signage, is the counter that Chef Honda developed from scratch. The alligator-hide textured curtain, the custom, splatter-painted pottery, and of course the utterly one of a kind menu are all expressions of his personality and creativity. Nearly hidden at the top of the stairs, this quiet, chef-led restaurant is unlike anywhere else in Tokyo.

Even the Akasaka location has a different atmosphere, more casual, and welcoming to larger groups of guests. At this original location, Chef Honda puts his back into (literally, with all the soba rolling) crafting unforgettable meals night after night, while guests enjoy watching his team from the counter.

For diners looking for something different, especially those that have fallen for the magic of fermentation and want to experience it through the eyes of a Japanese chef, Honda will satisfy all curiosity. The chef and his staff are all genuinely interesting people, not only talented chefs but also capable of infusing every bite with storytelling, meaning and intention. Who knows, maybe your visit will be the next inspiration in Honda Azabujuban’s ever evolving identity.

honda Azabujuban Branch

Disclaimer: All information is accurate at time of publication.

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