13 hours ago
Awesome tempura soba noodle breakfast makes this Tokyo hotel near Akihabara a budget travel hero
Skip the morning convenience store run and charge up for the day ahead with delicious seasonal tempura.
When we recently needed to book a hotel for a night in downtown Tokyo, Dormy Inn was high on our list. The chain is known for having comfortable rooms, spacious Japanese-style baths, and reasonable prices.
The Dormy Inn Premium Kanda ticks all those boxes, and is conveniently located, being a five-minute walk from Kanda Station and just about equidistant from the otaku attractions of the Akihabara neighborhood. Our room was equipped with an extra-comfy Simmons mattress…
…and the top-floor Japanese-style baths had both indoor and outdoor areas, where we were able to stretch out and soak away the fatigue of the day.
Once we were cleaned up, we hit the sack early, because what were looking forward to most of all was breakfast.
Sure, we could have just grabbed something from the convenience store on the first floor of the building, but Dormy Inn has some of the best breakfasts around. Most of them have their own special dishes that they offer as part of the buffet, and the Dormy Inn Premium Kanda actually has two: tempura and soba noodles!
They cook the tempura up right there in the kitchen, and it comes out beautifully. The exact types of tempura vary by season, and on the morning of our stay we could have as much tempura shrimp, pork, bamboo shoots, or snap peas as we wanted.
The tempura pork (pictured above) was especially tasty, with the morsels of meat treated with a plum sauce and wrapped in a shiso (Japanese basil) leaf before being battered and fried. Though the tempura isn't cooked to order, we saw the staff regularly bring out new batches of freshly cooked pieces, so if you bide your time you can probably grab one that's just out of the frying pan. They even offer the classy condiment of matcha salt (shown at the bottom left corner in that picture) to sprinkle over it.
And then there are the soba noodles, made from buckwheat and served either in a bowl of hot broth or cold with sauce on the side to dip them into.
The quality is great here too. Dormy Inn doesn't try to get cute with unusual flavors or textures, instead serving up an excellent example of orthodox soba noodles. They're good enough that we'd have no complaints if they were served to us in a dedicated soba specialty restaurant, but there's a way to kick everything up to an even higher rung of deliciousness.
As you can see, we had both tempura and soba on our tray, so it was very easy…
…to combine them as tempura soba! As a matter of fact, we suspect that Dormy Inn expects a lot of guests to do this, as their tempura pieces have a generous amount of breading, which lets them soak up more of the soba broth so that the flavors can dance together on your taste buds.
But even this wasn't our Dormy Inn breakfast soba's final form!
In addition to tempura and soba, the hotel's breakfast includes a variety of small side dishes, as well as salad, eggs, sausages, and fruit. Among those side dishes are things like soft-boiled eggs and tororo (grated yam), both of which are popular additions to a soba, and so they're just begging to be poured into your bowl.
So yes, the Dormy Inn Premium Kanda continues the tradition of breakfast excellence we previously experienced at the chain's Mt. Fuji and Nagoya locations. In talking with the staff, they said that sometimes the seasonal tempura offerings even include such gourmet ingredients as maitake mushrooms in autumn and oysters in winter, so we may need to book a few more nights before this year is done.
Hotel information Dormy Inn Premium Kanda / ドーミーインPREMIUM神田 Address: Tokyo-to, Chiyoda-ku, Kanda Sudacho 1-16 東京都 千代田区神田須田町1-16
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