In West Oakland, in the predawn morning, Koichi Ishii does something few other chefs in the United States can: He makes soba by hand.

In a small glass-walled room inside Soba Ichi, his new restaurant, he wipes down a large lacquered wooden bowl and weighs freshly milled buckwheat flour and water to pour inside. With fingers outspread, as if he’s performing a scene from “Cats,” he mixes the two, arms circling quickly in the bowl, a human KitchenAid. The flour becomes pebbles, then rocks, and somehow he’s soon kneading a smooth 5½-pound globe of dough that is ready to be rolled out into a sheet and cut by hand as well.

Ishii doesn’t fill up the room with music when he works. In fact, he shuts himself in the rolling area, preventing drafts of air from drying out the soba. The isolation leaves him with only the ssh-shushing of the dough against the well-floured table, then the stuttered knocking of the knife as he cuts through the noodles. And his breath, of course, which sometimes strains, despite the gentleness of the movements.

By 10:45 a.m. — earlier on weekends — customers already line up outside the gates to taste these noodles. Some have arrived early to secure one of 20-some portions of Ishii’s all-buckwheat noodles, which sell out in 15 minutes. Other early arrivals have learned the hard way that anyone who gets there by 11:30 will be stuck in the courtyard for an hour, waiting for the first tables to leave.

Soba Ichi sells out of soba noodles almost every day.

Three things to know about Soba Ichi Where: 2311 Magnolia St., Oakland, www.sobaichioakland.com. Open from 11 a.m. until the noodles run out Tuesday-Saturday. When to get there: 10:45 a.m. on weekdays, before 10:30 a.m. on Saturdays. What to get: Plain is good here. If you arrive early enough, try the jyuwari (100 percent buckwheat) noodles, $16; otherwise, get the nihachi (80 percent) soba served cold with tempura, $20, or hot, $14, plus as many side dishes as you can manage to order.

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Now in his 30s, Ishii arrived in Phoenix as a 21-year-old, prepared to study English and business — and truth be told, he confesses, skateboarding as well. He took a side job at a sushi bar. After a few years he hadn’t just fallen in love with cooking; a bigger mission had revealed itself to him. “When I came here the first time, there were no good Japanese noodles,” the cook says. “Especially soba noodles, which were terrible.” He resolved to learn to make proper soba and bring it to America.

Yamagata, Ishii’s home town in the northern stretch of Japan’s main island, is known for its buckwheat noodles. But the craft of making them by hand is dying out, even there.

According to Los Angeles cookbook author Sonoko Sakai, who herself has trained with soba masters in Tokyo, “artisan” soba makers like Ishii, who grind their own flour and who refuse the help of machines to roll and cut noodles, have become a rarity in Japan. “I last heard from my miller in Japan, who specializes only in buckwheat milling for soba houses, that there are about 40,000 soba shops (in the country), but less than 1 percent are true artisans,” she says.

Ishii returned to Yamagata for three years to train under two chefs, one of whom has since retired. Seven years ago, he returned to the States for a visit, where he met Christian Geidemann, who had recently opened Ippuku in Berkeley. Geidemann, taken with the idea of serving soba as well as yakitori, hired Ishii as sous-chef and helped him move to California. His soba lunches and weekly dinners there earned a quiet following.

Paul Discoe, the Buddhist priest and architect, and a partner in Ippuku, had built a restaurant on the compound he owns in West Oakland. When its first tenant, Fusebox, closed, Discoe offered the space to Geidemann, Ishii and their fellow Ippuku staffer Shinichi Washino, renovating it — in the same concrete-and-raw-wood style as Ippuku — to fit Ishii’s needs.

Sakai and Ishii only know of a few other restaurants in the U.S. that make their own soba noodles, notably, Soba Noodle Azuma in New York and Kamonegi in Seattle. Fewer still grind their own flour from American buckwheat the way Ishii does.

Traditional Yamagata soba is made from a mixture of 80 percent buckwheat and 20 percent wheat flour to contribute enough gluten to hold the noodles together as they cook. Ishii located a farmer in eastern Washington who was growing a Japanese varietal of buckwheat to export to Japan. The chef ordered a few tons, imported a stone mill from Japan and taught himself to make flour.

Milling isn’t just a matter of dumping scoops of buckwheat seeds into a machine. It takes patient effort for the grain to be cleaned, and then hulled and sorted by size. It takes hours for the fat stone wheels of the mill to spin, with a sound like the door of Aladdin’s cave rolling back, a trickle of flour flowing into a plastic bin underneath. It takes yet more time to sift the flour.

The advantage, Ishii found, was that his mill produces a flour so silky, so moist to the touch that in addition to traditional soba, he can make something he couldn’t before: 100 percent buckwheat noodles.

Soba Ichi serves the 80-20 soba hot, in a delicately sweet dashi-based broth, and both kinds of soba chilled and spread in a tangle across a mat alongside a soy-dashi-mirin dipping sauce. (Note: Despite being gluten-free, the all-buckwheat noodles share the same water as the mixed-grain ones, so celiac diners cannot eat them.)

The noodles have a sweetness and a nutty flavor that emerges only after you start chewing; the 100 percent buckwheat variety is marginally earthier, with more resistance to the touch. These are noodles you must be attentive to in order to appreciate them. Sakai, who teaches noodle-making workshops for home cooks, says that the reason she is obsessed with soba is because they are iki, effortlessly elegant. “You can’t get that iki-ness from slurping a bowl of ramen,” she says.

Ishii feels for the customers who get frustrated when he runs out of noodles. By lunch his soba-making is done, so they can’t watch him to see that it takes several minutes to grind, mix, roll and cut each portion. “You cannot supply more noodles,” he says. “Most people don’t get it.”

Most of the artisan soba restaurants in Japan, Sakai confirms, can only make 75 portions a day. It’s remarkable that Ishii produces almost 100 by himself. The chef is hoping to train one or two more cooks so he can open for dinner some day.

What he loves about making soba, he says, is that the process is always different. Where an outsider sees the hypnotic rolling and re-rolling of a circle of dough, he only notices the details: when the flour calls out for more water, when it demands he press the rolling pin harder, when he must spin the circle of dough to even out the thickness.

Those are the details that are so hard to pass on to other cooks. Until he can, the early mornings are his alone.