What was Hot Noodles Cold Sake?
Hot Noodles Cold Sake was the ramen shop that grew out of a fine-dining restaurant’s night off. For six years, chef Josh Hebert had turned Posh, his improvisational tasting-menu room in downtown Scottsdale, into a ramen counter every Tuesday. In May 2016 he told Phoenix New Times that ramen night had “pretty much outgrown one night a week,” and that fall he gave it a home of its own.
The shop opened without fanfare in early October 2016 at 15689 N Hayden Road, #127, in the busy shopping center just east of the 101 and south of Frank Lloyd Wright Boulevard, on the edge of the Scottsdale Airpark. It was 1,000 square feet, a former Philly cheesesteak shop a few doors from The Skeptical Chymist and in the same center as the original Grabbagreen. Hebert said he had spent more than two years looking for a space close to both a neighborhood and a strong lunch crowd, and the Airpark’s office towers supplied the lunch crowd.
The format was deliberately simple. You ordered and paid at a tablet kiosk, customized your bowl (extra pork, double noodles, a cured egg), and took a seat at the ramen bar or a table. The menu was the Posh ramen-night list: the sesame-based goma, Hebert’s signature, plus shoyu, miso, shrimp and a vegan mushroom bowl, with steamed buns, gyoza and edamame. New Times put the price at $15 and under a person. For the first weeks the sake in the name was missing, because the liquor license had not come through.
Hebert, a Valley native, says the obsession started in Tokyo, where he worked as a hotel chef and ordered his first bowl by pointing at what the man beside him was eating. A sign on the shop wall, in Japanese, read, as KJZZ translated it, “The noodle is the heartbeat. The soup is the soul.”
It closed on March 27, 2021, nearly five years in, when the lease ran out in the middle of the pandemic. Our verdict: it was the most serious bowl of ramen in north Scottsdale, from a chef who had already proved the point one Tuesday at a time.
What the menu was, bowl by bowl
Order the goma. Every review we found pointed first to the goma ramen, the sesame broth Hebert had been perfecting at Posh since 2010. New Times’ First Taste in October 2016 described it loaded with bok choy, Fresno and shishito peppers and sesame seeds, topped with chashu pork over a tangle of curly noodles, the broth creamy without being oily or thin. Shoyu, miso and shrimp bowls rounded out the list, with a mushroom-based vegan bowl for anyone skipping the pork.
Start with the buns. The pork and shrimp steamed buns were the starters to get: cloud-soft buns, the pork sweet and moist, the shrimp crunchy with pickled vegetables. The gyoza were the one miss on that first visit, six meaty dumplings in stiff, undercooked wrappers. Edamame, shishito peppers and mochi ice cream filled out the small menu ABC15 described at the end.
Use the set. At both lunch and dinner the tablet offered a ramen set, a bowl plus a drink plus a side: edamame at lunch, a small order of gyoza at dinner. When Hebert announced the shop he had floated a lunch meal of ramen, drink and side for $9 to $10 and dinner for about $15, and the sets came close to that. At Posh the same ramen had cost $13 a bowl on Tuesdays.
Go cold in July. In summer the kitchen served tsukemen with everything cold: noodles, broth, toppings and, once the license arrived, the sake. New Times critic Chris Malloy made it his Best Thing I Ate All Week in July 2018 and singled out the egg, boiled five minutes and then cured for three days in sugar, soy, dashi, mirin and sake. Ginger, bean sprouts and green onion came from the shoyu bowl’s toppings.
Getting there. The shopping center at Hayden and the 101 is sprawling and hard to navigate at lunch, New Times warned; the trick was to find The Skeptical Chymist and walk a few doors down. Hours ran Monday through Saturday from 11 a.m., to 10 p.m. at opening and 9 p.m. by 2018, closed Sunday. The crowd was what Hebert had planned for: Airpark office workers at noon, restaurant people and north Scottsdale neighbors at night.
The ramen night that left Posh
Hot Noodles Cold Sake belongs to a short list of Scottsdale restaurants that began as a chef’s side project inside another restaurant. Posh, which Hebert opened in 2009 on Rancho Vista Drive, was built around improvisation: diners checked off the ingredients they disliked and the kitchen wrote a menu for each table. From 2010 the Tuesday ramen nights, with okonomiyaki (his mother’s favorite dish, he told KJZZ) on the side, drew a following of their own, and by the time Hebert signed the Hayden Road lease he had been looking for a ramen space, by his own account, for more than two years. “When it comes to ramen and what I want to do in Arizona, I’m kind of looking for a unicorn,” he told New Times in 2016.
The shop did what he hoped. KJZZ found it busy within three months, and Hebert talked about more ramen shops around the Valley and maybe an okonomiyaki restaurant someday. Instead, Posh closed in 2017, and the noodle shop became his only restaurant. It was one of the few bowls in north Scottsdale with a fine-dining chef behind it; Scottsdale Quarter’s OBON brought its ramen-and-sushi format up Scottsdale Road in 2017.
The ending was a lease, not a failure. In March 2021, with less than two weeks’ notice, Hebert told ABC15 that the lease was up and that he was not prepared to sign another five years with the pandemic still unresolved. “It doesn’t mean it’s going away for good,” he said, leaving room for pop-ups. New Times put the closing among the month’s notable losses, nearly five years after opening, in the same roundup that recorded Alex Stratta closing Stratta Kitchen to reopen it as an Italian bistro. The press we found does not say what took over unit #127 afterward.
Honest assessment: Hot Noodles Cold Sake was a small, disciplined restaurant that did one thing, and the record suggests it did it as well as anyone in Scottsdale in the late 2010s. Its weak points were the ones New Times named, a stiff dumpling and a hard-to-find storefront, not the noodles. What it lost to was the arithmetic of a five-year lease in 2021, which closed better restaurants than this one and fewer that were as easy to miss.