Aidaya — Restaurant in Tokyo

Came here 20 minutes before opening on Saturday, there were only 1 person ahead of us.

I’ve order a Tsukemen with 2 dipping soups and wagyu beef rice set.

Wagyu beef is good, eggs very fresh and of a high quality. You can tell from the color. I would say it’s a nice gimmick to add to what I believe to be a good Tsukemen on its own already.

Now to Tsukemen, you can choose to have a cold noodle or hot noodle. I opted in for cold, the usual Tsukemen (now I that I’ve think about it, I should’ve opted in for hot noodle since soup could get cold fast). As for dipping soup, I ordered shrimp and pork bone seafood soup.

Shrimp soup is very strong in the nicer way possible, you can really taste the shrimp. While pork bone soup is the classic, but the soup isn’t as thick as one might imagine. Both of the soups are rather loose compared to other Tsukemen spot, which is a nice change.

Pork chashu, soft and smokey. There’s also a small cut of duck (if I recall correctly).

Overall, a great experience and don’t really need wagyu (I’m not complaining here, just saying that Tsukemen on its own is already great). The owner is also very nice and service minded. I would love to come back here again...

I really want to like this place but I’m only rating it a 3.5 because of how their queuing system works. I got there at 5:15 pm to be ahead of the 5:30 dinner service. Since they can only seat 9 people at a time, I did not make the first cut. Totally understandable, however, a group of seven people showed up and turns out this restaurant has a fast pass ticket that you can purchase so you can cut the line. I think the group knew this all along because they were very confident to just go ahead and be in front of everybody. I understand that this is a business and that’s how they make more money, but it’s just really offputting to be waiting for 45 minutes at this point, only to be cut by people who just showed up. I would literally be the next person to be seated at that point, but I had to wait for the whole group to be seated because of this fast pass ticket. Overall, my wait turned out to be about an hour , I would say, but only because I also went early. I think it would be worse for other people if they show up later. Anyway, I think it would just be a good highlight to put on this review because I did not read any previous...

Aidaya blew up over the last year and it’s well deserved! You got to line up before it opens.

Choose the special tsukemen set with wagyu beef over rice. For your set, you can choose two out of the four options they have for soups to dip your noodles in and if you’d like your noodles prepared hot or cold. The soup choices are:

-Pork bone seafood -Garlic soy sauce -Shrimp -Sesame paste and chili oil

With the cold noodle option, I tried the shrimp bisque and sesame paste and chili oil soup bases. The soups were thin yet clung to the noodles well. It was a nice flavor contrast to dip between the two. The chasui was standard but the deep red tamago egg was delicious.

The Wagyu sirloin rice was delicious, cooked fresh right in front of you by the chef. He places the cooked Wagyu in a raw egg and you can pour that all over your rice. Definitely get this with your meal and come hungry because this and the tsukemen set will fill you up!

The shop is small and has maybe 10 counter seats, so the queue is long...