By Howie Southworth

Often, it’s the low-profile, scantly marketed eateries that change your perspective the most.

After a chilly and muddy morning of hiking in the seaside suburb of Kamakura, a crude depiction of a steaming noodle bowl on a modest storefront window seemed downright comforting. Wasabi founder Bo Davis and I ducked through a thin curtain separating the busy street from the steam cloud of our dreams.

Kamatama U-don Ya noodle bar is a small, savory sauna, a temple of soup. It furnishes seats for a slender eight, but somehow it wasn’t cramped. We’ll call it cozy. The wife-and-husband team of purveyors are the only staff, the cute and artful kitchen an extension of their home. As the rooster crows, she’s deep into making hand-pulled noodles, as he crafts, from scratch, an expert dashi broth of dried sardines, kelp, turnip and smoked tuna shavings.

“Buddha U-don Noodle” (Photograph by Howie Southworth)

They wittily finish our order of the popular “Buddha U-don Noodle” with two “eyebrows” of scallions, two “eyes” of boiled egg, a “nose” of tempura crab leg and a red pepper grin. The soup provided a smooth yet satisfying game for the teeth, but it was the broth—flavorful but not fishy, punchy but not salty, full-bodied but not overly thick—that proved to be the ultimate star of the show.

Though three days of masterpiece edibles had our minds racing with the next great Japanese import, true inspiration lived in this basic bowl of noodles.

Postscript: Wasabi hopes to attain u-don nirvana in the coming months. Three chefs will try their hand at recreating our post-lunch feeling from that chilly day in Kamakura. Following the democratization-of-food trend of late, Davis plans to put the competing cauldrons up for a public vote before selecting Wasabi’s new u-don broth.