Soba-Ya: hand-cut soba Monday and Tuesday

hand cut soba with mushroom dipping sauce

Common Grains sounds like it could be an earnest hippie-owned bakery, but it's actually a cultural project. The Japanese rice company Shinmei is backing the project to showcase a diversity of grains to Americans, in partnership with Sonoko Sakai, a film producer and expert maker of handmade Japanese buckwheat noodles or soba.
The Common Grains soba and sake tasting at Silver Lake Wine today is sold out, but you can still get a hand-cut soba fix at Soba-Ya in Torrance Monday and Tuesday from 5-9 p.m. The soba is has a higher percentage of buckwheat flour than is found in commercial soba, so it's full of flavor with much less gluten and regular wheat flour than other pasta. (Buckwheat is not related to wheat but is in the same family as rhubarb and sorrel.) We tasted the hand-cut soba at the Atwater Crossing pop-up, and the noodles are full of spring and character, with a pleasantly earthy note.
Try to fit in a visit to Soba-Ya while the pop-up is going on, but if not, the new Soba-Ya restaurant will continue serving hand-made, but not hand-cut noodles after Tuesday.
Here's more on Soba-Ya's menu from Gourmet Pigs.

Soba-Ya, 1757 W. Carson Street, Suite R & S, Torrance, 310.782.7356