Godaime Hanayama Udon: The Viral Flat Noodles Drawing Crowds in Ginza

The Ginza shop is a branch of a family run restaurant that spent more than a century as a regional udon maker in Gunma rather than a Tokyo restaurant.

Oni Himokawa arrives as a wide, thin ribbon about five centimeters across when cooked, closer to a sheet of fresh pasta than to anything most visitors picture when they hear udon. It comes chilled with a dipping sauce or hot in broth, and the texture is smooth across the surface with a soft chew that holds together better than the width suggests.

The Oni Kama with it is freshly boiled Oni Himokawa topped with Gunma raised Joshu mugibuta pork and a soft egg, finished with dashi shoyu is one of the more popular dishes here. At 1,200 yen it also sits close to the middle of the menu. If you would rather taste the noodle with less around it, the chilled zaru with two dipping sauces is 900 yen and is likely what you've been seeing on social media. Okkirikomi bowls appear seasonally, most recently a chilled chicken and tomato version, so treat those as a bonus rather than something to plan around.

The noodle itself dates to the Taisho era and stopped being produced in the middle of the last century. The fifth generation owner recovered the old production records and brought it back in 2013, and it won a national udon competition that year and in the two that followed. A discontinued regional noodle became the company's signature dish inside three years.

Getting in takes more planning than eating does. The Ginza branch does not seat walk ins in the order they arrive. A machine issues numbered tickets for both lunch and dinner and guests are called in turn, so the line you actually stand in is the one for the ticket, and it forms before the doors open. Arrive ahead of opening, take a ticket before you do anything else, and then explore Ginza until your number is called.

The shop is at 3-14-13 Ginza, directly behind the Kabukiza, three minutes from exit 3 at Higashi-ginza. It seats twenty nine at tables and is entirely non smoking. Weekdays run 11:00 to 15:30 and again from 17:30 to 21:30. Weekends and public holidays are lunch only, 11:00 to 16:00, with no dinner service at all, which is the detail most likely to catch out a weekend visitor. Most noodle dishes land between 900 and roughly 1,400 yen.

Two other Tokyo branches serve the same noodle. There is a Nihonbashi shop, on the street where the founder first met the regional noodles that started the family making udon at all, and one at Haneda Airport Garden beside Terminal 3, which is worth knowing on an arrival or departure day.

This is not a hidden gem by any stretch of the imagination. The width of the noodle has made it one of the most photographed bowls in Ginza, and the ticket machine exists because of it. Come for the noodle and the story behind it, and treat the wait as the price of both.