Pai Ron/Morioka白龍 本店/盛岡

 

This closet of a shop, on the road leading directly perpendicular from the middle of Iwate Koen, was suprisingly good. You will note that the pictures in the Tabelog link below have no shots of the inside of the restaurant, probably because it's so tiny and crowded, we literally had to work to squeeze ourself into a table between the counter and the wall. Here the jya jya men comes in several sizes, the small (450 yen) is more like an appetizer or side dish size. The noodles were all made in the store, some were whitish and some were green. Jya jya men noodles are more similar to udon noodles than any other type. The miso paste sauce for the noodles was extremely salty and garlicky, and there is a basket of fresh eggs at each table for you to open and mix up into your noodles. I apologize for the quality of the above picture. The correct way to eat jya jya men is to mix all of the ingredients together. A very tasty mugi-cha (barley tea) was also served at the table. If you are visiting Iwate Koen (there's a nice rose garden in the back behind the shrine (the rectangle with three squares in it on the Google map), however it also appears to have it's share of homeless people) then I recommend you stop by.

Morioka Jya Jya Men Reviews
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Sei Rou Kaku/Morioka盛楼閣/盛岡

  

On the last day of our Morioka trip we returned to Morioka City, checked our bags into a locker near the Tohoku shinkansen entrance, and set out to see a bit of the city. Of course my first agenda item was the local noodle specialities that I was told were "must-eats" by my Japanese coworkers. The first of these was Morioka reimen, a cold noodle dish with very chewy noodles, hard-boiled egg, a chunk of fairly chewy beef, and watermelon or pear served in a spicy kim-chi-like broth. This dish is supposedly originally from Korea. The place that I chose out of necessity, since our time was limited, was Sei Rou Kaku on the second floor of Gen Plaza, a combination noodle and yakiniku place near the station. This was Monday late morning and the place wasn't that crowded. In fact for a Monday it seems like the entire city wasn't in that much of a hurry, or at all that crowded. So the reimen was quite good, and the noodles were very chewy and slightly translucent. The spiciness of the kimchi broth was available in 5 levels, I went with the medium one and I probably could have gone one up from there. The broth is served cold though. I'm sure there are many many reimen places in Morioka but this one wasn't too bad for a first shot.

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