Traditional cuisine intersects with a distinctive modern sensibility at Sorano-niwa. Newly opened on one of Ebisu's quieter back streets, this is an almost textbook example of how some of Japan's most representative foods are being updated and repackaged for the new millennium.
The design motifs are all 21st-century wabi-sabi. A sturdy wooden door slides open to reveal bare concrete and exposed lighting ducts. The walls have been given the packed-mud, raked-sand look, but the zasshiki seating areas are floored with luminous green plastic, not tatami. The waiters wear jackets of slub cotton and the restroom floor is a pebble-strewn rock garden. But the airwaves are filled not with the plaintive twang of koto but contemporary R&B.
Sorano-niwa -- the poetically named "Garden of the Sky" -- specializes in traditional soy products. That means tofu in its various guises, of course, but also yuba, the skin that forms on the surface of soy milk when it is heated; and unohana (a.k.a. okara), the fiber-rich soy lees left over from the tofu-making process. These are foods most often associated with the rarified (and overly-formal) temple cooking of Kyoto. Here, however, they are given a more down-to-earth treatment, worthy of a modern urban izakaya.