Soba Lunch at I-NABA HONOLULU Restaurant

Over the weekend we had lunch at I-Naba Honolulu Restaurant. We've been there once before, a few years ago when it just opened. It's located at 1610 South King Street and their website is InabaHonolulu.com. They are a soba & tempura restaurant that imports their buckwheat flour from Nagano (not sure about their wheat flour). It's a very small restaurant (used to be Dai-ryu if you remember) with only about seating for 25 including counter seating. I had the Tenpura Box with Regular Size Soba set which was about $16. The sauce on the tenpura is a sweet sauce. It tasted good, but maybe just a little bit too sweet for my preferences. The specialty soba noodles are very delicate and tasty, but the broth was a little bit too strong for me so I didn't drink it up or that would have been too much salt. Kelli had the Maguro Zuke set with Cold Soba for about $15. I was considering ordering this, but it's a good thing I didn't. We were both surprised when the Maguro Zuke came out and it was seared and sliced! We were expecting common maguro zuke which is raw sashimi. I don't like cooked fish so I would not have even eaten it if I ordered it. Kelli ate it, but didn't care for it because it started tasting really fishy toward the end. Very strange, but their photo of the dish on their on-line menu shows it raw (as we would have liked it). **Note it also says "change to regular size soba for $2" on the on-line menu, but it's actually $3 now. Overall it was ok. It's probably the reason why we haven't been there since they first opened. I think we both prefer Matsugen Soba (my blog posts are here & here. Does anyone else miss the Dai-ryu of about 20-25 years ago? I do. I didn't really care for the most recent 10-15 years, but I really enjoyed Dai-ryu when Checkers Auto Parts was still a movie theater!