Ever dine atop a waterfall? How about slurp noodles delivered to you through a tangle of bamboo pipes? You can do both at Hirobun, located just 30 minutes outside of Kyoto in Kibune. The restaurant is a hybrid of two only-in-Japan dining genres: kawadoko (“place at the river”), where diners eat on platforms built over rushing cool streams of water, and somen-nagashi, where thin white wheat-flour noodles are “flushed” down waterslide-like tubes toward diners who await their splashy arrival with open chopsticks and bowls of mentsuyu sauce and garnishes for dipping. Each diner gets his own noodle tube, so germaphobes can relax.
