At TenGoku Aburiya restaurant, Mariko Kallister showcases her hand-pulled buckwheat noodles in front of a captivated audience. Don't miss out on a chance to taste the pure and natural flavors of Japanese cuisine. | ✍️ mikesula
Kallister’s “master” is Kunihiro Takahashi, aka “the God of Soba Noodles,” whose restaurant Daruma, in the mountains near Hiroshima, was a mecca for the serious soba adherent.
Kallister makes the latter variety, though she grew up far from soba central, in industrial Nagoya, Japan’s third-largest city by area. After college, she worked as a corporate event planner for a few years before the town’s conservatism wore her down, and she kicked off a period of wanderlust. She studied English in Boston, taught Japanese to IT workers in Bangalore, India, and roamed around Europe drinking craft beer with her brother.
Kallister first met her future husband when they were both teaching English in Nagoya. In 2007, they married and settled in Chicago, where she took on a role as a freelance sake consultant. In 2008, she organized a major sake tasting event at the Consulate-General of Japan in Chicago, inviting some ten breweries to town. Another event followed the next year.
“He holds a timer,” she says. “He says, ‘You are going to have to finish it within 40 minutes, otherwise the soba gets dry.’ The texture gets lost. And then the smoothness, the flavor. It’s all gone. So minimum movement and speed and not doing any unnecessary motion.” She and a fellow student would make two batches in the morning, eat soba for lunch, then roll out three more in the afternoon.
So the dream was deferred, and then it stalled out completely when the couple’s marriage broke up. Now a single mom, Kallister took on a series of corporate jobs, but she kept her hands in the dough, particularly after a chance encounter at a sushi bar with a new Japanese Consul General led to her first performance at the Consulate residence in Evanston in 2017. A second followed at Murasaki Sake Lounge in Streeterville.
Using a set of three rolling pins, she flattened the dough, turning it by 30 degrees with each roll, gradually coaxing it into a square. She then folded it upon itself a dozen times, each layer about a millimeter and a half thick. She set the dough sheets atop a long wooden cutting board, and using a smaller board on top as a guide, began cutting.
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