Hanon, a new udon shop in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, was produced by the union of a Tokyo video-production company and a Japanese manufacturer of unusually thin condoms. The condoms became the subject of a series of advertisements on which the production company worked; in one of them, called “Acts of Love,” dancers in London re-enact, with surprising grace and dignity, the mating rituals of blue-footed boobies, fiddler crabs and other animals.
Well, kids, when two companies like each other very much, sometimes they decide to create a new company together. That is what happened with the production firm and the prophylactics people when, for reasons that are perhaps best not to question, they hit upon the idea of expanding their product line from condoms into noodles.
The restaurant lies across Union Avenue from Kellogg’s Diner. Its door is marked during business hours by the fluttering white noren curtains. It is the second Hanon location. The first is about 6,700 miles away, in the city of Kamakura, which lies south of Tokyo and is known for soba, not udon. This gave Hanon the advantage of not competing against any of Japan’s established udon styles, leaving its chef, Takahiro Yanagisawa, free to come up with his own.
Mr. Yanagisawa, who had spent 25 years making sushi before turning to noodles, focused his innovative urges on the dough. He began by adding wheat germ and bran to the white flour that in udon is typically used alone. The resulting noodle is called zenryufun or whole wheat. The bran and germ are Mr. Yanagisawa’s attempts to make a more healthful udon, but they also add flavor, a mottled color and a slightly rough texture that holds on to the dashi-based broth.
This dough is also made into a green noodle, called sasauchi, by mixing in powdered barley shoots and leaves of kuma-zasa, a bamboo variety that pandas dote on. To the human palate, or at least this human’s palate, sasa tastes something like green tea.
Both the speckled zenryufun and the green sasauchi are flat noodles, resembling fettuccine that has been working out. Avoiding extremes, they are moderately chewy and reasonably springy. Either flavor, or both, can be ordered cold and spread on a bamboo mat for dunking into a sauce, either a peanut-buttery sesame sauce or the traditional dashi-based dipping sauce. For larger or more curious appetites, these dipping noodles, called seiro udon, can be dangled into a hot duck soup in which a few hunks of well-boiled duck meat swim.
The restaurant makes a fresh batch of its broad, flat noodles each morning.CreditJohn Kernick for The New York Times
The cold noodles can also be accessorized with whipped mountain yam or tempura or both. If you had stumbled into Hanon under the impression that it was another generic Williamsburg noodle mill, the tempura would set you straight. The crust is engineered for udon, thick and substantial enough that it will not dissolve and float away in the soup, yet somehow not oily or clunky. The tempura is served with sea salt, which will not only season the fried blowfish tails, shrimp, mushroom and vegetables, but will also do very good things to any noodles it happens to meet.
With the hot soups, there is no choice of noodles. All are made with zenryufun. The plain broth, a dashi augmented by white soy sauce, is not so salty or concentrated that I didn’t want to drink it all. It also performs well made into a thick-but-not-sludgy curry soup with thin pink slices of washugyu beef; a shaggy, mossy, salty-sour mass of ume and kombu; and a soup of shaved beef and onions that tastes like a deeper, stronger version of French dip jus and is blitzed by a little grated yuzu peel at the end.
A few near-relatives of udon make it to the menu as well. The beef-and-onion combination can also be had over rice. Creamy, slightly spicy cod roe is tossed with zenryufun for an excellent mentaiko pasta that, for once, relies on the roe rather than Kewpie mayonnaise to make an impression.
The eventual plan is to sell both colors of noodle to grocery stores and other restaurants — to become, in essence, the Sun Noodle of the udonisphere. This would be a gain for New York, but for the moment Hanon’s udon is found only at Hanon, where the noodles are made fresh each day.
Any plan for world domination is not hinted at on the restaurant’s Facebook page, which seems to be its home base online, though nobody has bothered to post a menu there yet. Nor does the dining room suggest a budding global chain. Atmospheric and presumably expensive prints by the photographers Takashi Homma and Nobuyoshi Araki hang over the tables, and a signed Cy Twombly lithograph has been placed by the door to the backyard. The music — torch songs, jazz piano — seems to be coming from a radio tuned to another decade.
A lot of this cocktail music will make more sense once the liquor license comes through. Hanon is getting set to offer sake, shochu and wines chosen by Jorge Riera, who built the list at Frenchette and has turned countless New Yorkers on to the fizzy, fuzzy and furry delights of natural wines.
The idea of Hanon is not to slurp and slide out, but to stay for a meal: a chilled French red with the fried chicken and Japanese omelet, maybe, and something a bit brawnier with curry soup. Dessert could be a tofu blancmange, smooth and white and somewhat sweet, but there is more satisfaction in the grainy, earthy bricks of red bean paste.
The meal might end with tea, to which the restaurant takes the same unhurried approach it applies to everything else. The iced oolong is slowly cold-brewed; a bamboo whisk and ceramic chawan are kept on the dining counter for painstakingly whipping up bowls of matcha; an appliance imported from Taiwan will transform freshly steeped hojicha and ice into a tan froth, a process that takes about five minutes. This foam tea is dairy-free, unlike Taiwan’s infamous cheese tea. It is served in a wine glass, and the experience of drinking it is similar to tackling a pint of Guinness before the head has settled down.
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