Osoba Ni-Hachi: Shoushin's Jackie Lin bets on soba in Toronto

Osoba Ni-Hachi, a soba restaurant from Jackie Lin, the chef and owner of the Michelin-starred sushi counter Shoushin, is coming to 154 Cumberland Street in Toronto's Yorkville, blogTO reported on 24 September. Lin announced it in a video on Shoushin's Instagram account; the opening is planned for this autumn, with no date yet.

Shoushin has served Edomae sushi near Yonge and Lawrence since 2015, and two days before the announcement it kept its single star in the Michelin Guide Toronto 2026, one of 14 one-star restaurants in a selection with a single two-star address. The new project swaps raw fish for buckwheat.

How Osoba Ni-Hachi will source its soba

Frozen noodles from Yamagata answer the supply question; Toronto's appetite for buckwheat is the open one.

The name is a statement of method. Ni-hachi means two-eight in Japanese and refers to the classic ratio of 20 per cent wheat flour to 80 per cent buckwheat, the formula behind most soba for centuries, Toronto Life explained.

Lin will not make the noodles on site. According to Toronto Life, he has turned to a two-generation soba maker in Yamagata, the prefecture blogTO calls the soba capital of Japan. The fresh noodles are made with Dewa Kaori, a fragrant, elastic buckwheat variety grown there, and shipped frozen to Toronto. Next to the classic blend there will be a 100 per cent buckwheat version made only for Osoba Ni-Hachi.

“It's almost like a mission of mine to bring really healthy, delicious soba noodles into Toronto,” Lin says in the announcement video, quoted by blogTO. He told Toronto Life that the city has never had a restaurant dedicated to soba, and the idea took shape after a trip to Yamagata.

Soba sets by day, izakaya by night

The format runs in two shifts. At lunch the menu is built on soba sets; in the evening the room becomes a soba-led izakaya with both à la carte and omakase menus, Toronto Life reported. blogTO adds that the soba will come in two styles, both drawn from Yamagata's noodle culture, and that Lin has a partner in the venture. Prices, seat count and opening hours have not been published.

The address is a few streets from Yorkville Avenue, where Aburi Hana reopened under a new chef earlier this month with a looser à la carte format. Japanese cooking in the neighbourhood is moving away from the single long tasting menu.

The frozen-noodle route answers the obvious supply question: Dewa Kaori is a Yamagata crop, not an Ontario one. The open question for the autumn is whether Toronto diners give a bowl of buckwheat the attention they give a sushi counter.