Shishito with Whitebait ($7) featured spicy stir-fried peppers with tiny fish that I’ve enjoyed most in Korean banchan preparations. At Otatfuku, they’re pleasantly chewy and salty.

The metal bowl of Egg with Eel and Perilla ($10) included a kelp-based soup stock, tender fresh water eel cuts, egg strands and aromatic Japanese parsley. Otafuku uses egg yolks in the broth as a thickening agent, to good effect. The “soup” is hearty, true comfort food.

Simmered Chicken Liver ($5) showcased cool, minerally liver chunks cooked in soy sauce and mirin (a sweet sake-like rice wine), garnished with marinated ginger strands. Liver is better hotter, with a sear and a supple interior. Cold, it’s almost crumbly.

Otafuku Homemade Fried Chicken ($10) turned out to be fairly innocuous chicken chunks with coats that could have been crisper. A few dips in salt helped. The chicken came with a nice mixed green salad with yuzu vinaigrette.

Otafuku’s specialty is seiro soba ($11.50 for large serving), a “quite thin white noodle made of a mixture of special white buckwheat flour, using only the heart of soba seeds.” It’s possible to get seiro cold (traditional), with tempura, chicken soup, gravy and egg, or curry. We got it simple, dipping al dente noodles in soy sauce stirred with razor-thin scallions and faux wasabi.

After you picking the last noodle from Otafuku’s bamboo mat, the waitress brings a pitcher of soba-yu, broth enriched with residual starch from buckwheat noodles. The cooking liquid was soothing on a cool night, meshing surprisingly well with remaining soy, “wasabi” and scallions.