A man who sells firewood in Akashi, Yosano-cho, Kyoto Prefecture, has opened a soba restaurant called "Kagiya." The restaurant is famous for its green soba noodles made with early-harvested buckwheat, which are boiled in a firewood oven and served in a heated wood stove. He has realized his long-held dream by combining soba and firewood in a unique "two-sword style."
Teruaki Kagii (56 years old) joined the Akashi Soba Club after being impressed by the soba noodles he ate at a local event about 30 years ago. He started making soba noodles while working at an electrical construction company, and honed his skills by frequenting popular soba restaurants in Kita-ku, Kyoto.
"Soba noodles have different tastes depending on where they are made, and there are many different techniques, so it's deep, and I became obsessed with it. I wanted to open a restaurant someday."
The trigger for making firewood was installing a wood stove in a newly built house. As the residents are aging and fewer people go into the mountains, he is asked to cut down trees, and he starts making a lot of firewood. He retired early from his company in September 2024 and started selling firewood. He mainly uses deciduous trees, dries them in a vinyl greenhouse, and turns them into products that are highly valued by restaurants and users of wood stoves.
The soba restaurant opened in mid-January after renovating a garage that used to be a textile factory. He boils soba noodles and rice in a stove that he purchased from a supplier in Nanao City, Ishikawa Prefecture. The soba noodles are made from 100% buckwheat flour, without wheat flour, and are ground in a stone mill early in the morning. They offer two colors of soba noodles: green, made from the green berries before they ripen and turn black, and regular brown.
Kagii says, "Green soba has a strong aroma. In the future, I would like to try to make it possible for customers to fully order the noodles, including the origin and thickness of the noodles. I think I'm the only person in the world who combines firewood and soba. I enjoy every day." He lives a fulfilling life.
The restaurant is open only on Saturdays and Sundays, from 11:00 a.m. to 2:00 p.m.
