Eating Alone at Yume Ga Arukara
On getting it perfect.
Is this technically a restaurant review? The other night, after getting a haircut, but before getting home, I needed dinner. The unseasonably warm day was settling into a windy January night, but still pleasant enough out for a long-ish walk. So, I thought I’d take myself to Yume Ga Arukara.
For the uninitiated, Yume Ga Arukara serves, primarily, bowls of hand-pulled udon noodles from within the Porter Exchange building in Cambridge. It’s not hard to find, though the inside of the Porter Exchange is and always has been very much a dead mall—now home to a few administrative offices of Lesley University and a couple of restaurants that are, frankly, too good to be housed within such a liminal space.
There is a system to ordering which involves—first—ordering, and then queuing up to wait for a spot at one of their few counter-serve seats, and then getting your meal. The rules aren’t obvious, and it’s easy to screw up—which I have, forgetting—getting in line first, then having to get back out. But now I appreciate the ritual—the idea that a restaurant can be, from start to end and front of house to back, methodical. Everyone, guests included, operates in service of good food.
The atmosphere is convivial in that it is small, with shared tables—but at the same time, everyone faces forward toward the kitchen—and the person beside me was also alone. I think it’s an ideal place for doing so. None of the awkwardness of a mostly empty table and because you’ve already waited, your food arrives nearly as soon as you sit. Anyways, they did not say hi, and I didn’t really want them to. In the minutes before my plate arrived, I noticed them taking breaks between each bite to wipe their face.
When I got my dish, I poked the poached egg with one chopstick, the swirling yolk into the cold noodles. I tried to get every last bit of scallion and tiny shrimp, and when the broth was too shallow to scoop up in my spoon, I picked up the bowl to drink the last few sips.
We’ve got a perfect in the first row, the server announced as they cleared my place. Perfect, everyone in the open kitchen echoed back. Before I got up, I looked down and noticed all the little flecks of chili oil splattered across my shirt.