Customers come out for one last bowl of soba at Nenoue.

May 11 was a bittersweet day at Nakatsugawa Station in Gifu Prefecture. It was also a salty and savory day, but the mood was wistful as soba noodle restaurant Nenoue Soba said goodbye to customers and permanently closed.

Nenoue Soba was said to be the last remaining tachigui (stand-and-eat) soba restaurant on a train station platform in Gifu Prefecture, but that’s not the only thing that made it special, as Nenoue’s history stretches back to 122 years ago.

▼ Nenoue Soba

Station platform tachigui soba restaurants used to be fairly commonplace in Japan, and were popular as places where travelers and commuters could grab a quick hot meal at an affordable price while waiting for their train. Over the years, though, they’ve become harder to find, as alternative options for people who’re hungry and in a hurry, such as convenience stores and fast food chains, have proliferated.

There’s a bit of room for semantic debate about whether Nenoue Soba is a true platform restaurant, as it’s located slightly off the actual passenger boarding area. What can be definitively said, though, is that the restaurant’s story begins shortly after the opening on Nakatsugawa Station itself in December of 1902, when it began as Baishintei, a restaurant that sold bento boxed lunches. When the station underwent renovations in 1978, Baishintei renamed itself Nenoue and transitioned to being a soba restaurant, which it’s operated as ever since.

▼ No seats and a dining counter connected to the kitchen lets customers who’ve got a train to catch get in and out as quickly as possible.

For the past 20 years, Nenoue Soba has been operated by a married couple, Mr. and Mrs. Ando, and two other employees. However, due to health issues Mr. Ando has been in the hospital since last fall, and keeping the restaurant going become too large a task for just three people to handle, so it was decided to close Nenoue permanently on May 11.

122 years is a long time to build up a customer base, and so on the restaurant’s last day a line of people who’d come for one last bowl of soba had formed even before the restaurant opened.

One customer said he’d been coming to Nenoue Soba for over 50 years, and is part of a multi-generational family of fans. “I’d come here with my grandpa. He’d have a cup of sake while I ate my soba,” he reminisced. “I’d stop in for a bowl of soba on my way to work in the morning, psyching myself up for the day ahead,” recalled another. “It’s like this place raised me…the lady at the counter would say ‘Do your best today’ when I left, and it made me feel so happy.”

“I feel a sense of calm now that it’s over,” said Mrs. Ando after the restaurant closed on its last day, “and also sad, but more than anything I feel grateful that so many more people than we expected came out to see us.”

“I feel a sense of calm now that it’s over,” said Mrs. Ando after the restaurant closed on its last day, “and also sad, but more than anything I feel grateful that so many more people than we expected came out to see us.”

122 years is an impressive run for any business, but it’s still sad to see Nenoue Soba go, though noodle fans can at least take heart that there are still other platform tachigui soba restaurants left in Japan.

Source: Chukyo TV via Yahoo! Japan News, Chunichi Shimbun
Top image: Pakutaso
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