Kirari (Kyoto-shi, Fushimi-ku)

つけ麺 きらり
つけめん きらり
Tsukemen Kirari

Norinori tsukemen: 19 / 20

This shop is special – this is obvious already from the outside, with people inconfortably queueing on the elevated rim of the pavement. I had been there a few months ago to try their shioton ramen, and had been so enthusiastic that it was clear to me I had to come back to try their "norinori" tsukemen. A day of plum blossom hunt in Kyoto was the occasion for this.

Broth: A very thick tonkotsu gyokai that sticks perfectly to the noodles – in a somehow similar fashion to Fuunji in Tokyo, although not as sweet (because it’s tonkotsu, and not torigara, as far as I know), and with maybe a more pronounced gyokai taste. The soup is so thick, and sticks so much to the noodles, that I basically finished all of it with my noodles (although I had order the regular, "nami" size, not the big one!) You also get a piece of lemon that you can press into the broth, but I don’t think it’s worth doing so. And I did unfortunately put too much of dashi in my soup wari, so this part was not a great success.

Noodles: Thick noodles with an egg taste, not very salted, very mochi mochi, just perfect – they were kind of hard to slurp though.

Meat: A few cubes of onctuous, delicious meat, with a very melting fat.

Egg: Two halves of a sublime egg: tasty white, whose taste is progressively submerged by the intensity of the gooey yolk.

Toppings: Many sheets of nori and some white onion in the bowl, that both fit perfectly well with the broth. Three very thick, fibrous menma, not so salted – they had a flavor that was definitely familiar, but I could not put a name on it (if you ate there and have any idea, please leave a comment below).

Look at this tsukemen, proud like a peacock making the wheel. And proud it can be: very simply, this tsukemen is perfect. Your personal preferences might make you lean towards other dishes, but like at Takakura Nijo, I cannot think of any flaw. If you are on your way between Osaka and Kyoto on the Keihan line, do yourself a favor and stop here. Icing on the cake: the employees are very friendly.

More info on ramendb.

Other review: Philoramen (for the shio-tonkotsu ramen)

Menya Sou (Tokyo-to, Meguro-ku)

麺屋宗 -sou- (中目黒店)
めんやそう
Menya Sou

Shio ramen with ajitama: 16 / 20

One month ago, I could try Meny Sou at the Ramen Expo in Bampaku kinen koen in Osaka and had been hugely disappointed. I could not believe that their ramen would be that unremarkable, so on the first occasion I went back to Tokyo, I ran there to try it at one of the real shops. Good idea: it was WAY better.

Broth: A very good shio broth, intense in taste, with clear onion notes (there are actually bits of dried onion in the broth).

Noodles: Slightly curly, neither firm nor soft, they have an interesting texture in mouth - they get soft a bit too quick to my taste though.

Meat: A very good slice of firm, lean braised meat.

Egg: A good egg, with a very well infused white part, slightly sweet, but a bit too soft. The yolk was well cooked, gooey on the liquid side.

Toppings: A long menma with a curious jagged shape, soft and mild - but with a distinctive classical taste, infused with the broth. Some mizuna. You can also help yourself with pepper (I recommend it!) or plum vinegar (I’m less convinced by this one).

Definitely, this had nothing in common with the uninteresting broth I got at the Ramen Expo one month earlier. I really think that ramen events, although fun and sympathetic, are not the best way to discover a good ramen - except maybe for ramen with a powerful broth (my two niboshi ramen there - Katoya and Nagi - were great experiences).

Anyway, this is one of the great ramen of the capital city - I may prefer Mendokoro Ginzasa or Shirohachi, but it follows closeby. As some of the ramen blogs below have pointed, this is better than the more famous AFURI - indeed, way better.

More info on ramendb.

Other reviews: Ramenate, Ramen Walker, Ramen Adventures (for a limited edition), Ramenislove (limited edition also), Go Ramen!, Ramen Tokyo, Tokyo Family Guy.

Mengenso (Osaka-shi, Kita-ku)

麺元素
めんげんそ
Mengenso

Shio ramen: 17 / 20
(魚元素ラーメン, 塩)

Tori paitan with spicy miso : 17 / 20
(鶏元素ラーメン, 辛みそ付き)

Naka naka ramen: 17 / 20
(中々)

Naka naka ramen with ontama and seaweed: 17 / 20

Being talked to in a (good!) English by a friendly waiter when approaching a ramen restaurant is a rare experience - so when this restaurant happens to be one of the best in the area, that’s definitely something not to be missed for the non-Japanese speaker. Accompanied by my family, we sat at one of the two tables at the back of the room. We had the shio ramen, a tori paitan with a side spoon of spicy miso, and two bowls of their signature dish, the naka naka, a mix of shio and tori paitan (we ordered one of them with some added nori, and an onsen tamago replacing the regular half ajitama). But the diversity of their dishes does not stop there, they also have a shoyu tuskemen and a shoyu ramen! Let’s start with the shio:

Broth: Where most shio are too light in taste, this one has a very intense and delicious stock taste. Press the sudachi in your broth after you’ve eaten half of it to give some pleasant citrus-twist.

Noodles: Well cooked, neither firm nor soft, just a perfect middle point.

Meat: To some extent, the letdown of this otherwise perfectly crafted bowl: two slices of lean, firm pork with some taste of brine - not bad, but not remarkable either.

Egg: Half of a perfect slightly sweet ajitama: a white part strong in taste, and a firm-but-gooey yolk that is exactly what you need for a shio broth.

Toppings: The nori gave a very pleasant marine twist. You get a generous amount of sweetish menma, which had the classical mix of texture - crunchy under the teeth, and soft inside - brought to the point of perfection! A few small shrimps, chili stripes and negi.

What a delight! When finishing my bowl, the concentration of spices with the sweet menma formed an absolutely delectable mix. If you like shio ramen, you HAVE to try it, you won’t find much better broth around (although it's kind of a tie with Shiogensui - review to come!), and everything but the meat is just perfect.

Let me now say a few words about the other dishes, which have nothing to envy to this one.

The tori paitan has a shoyu tare and was obviously thicker, but not too much compared to your regular tori paitan - it was more creamy than thick. The chicken taste was not so present, but there were some pleasant bits of dry onions and a generous amount of pepper. The spicy miso was excellent and it was good to have it on the side, so that you can decide how much you want to add. A hearthy (but not overwhelming) winter dish.

The naka naka, which is a mix of the shio and the tori paitan, was, well, intermediate in taste. A bit creamy, with a beautiful variety of flavors.

If you choose to take the runny onama rather than the hard ajitama, you can mix it in the soup, which becomes then nicely thicker.

All these variants are excellent in their own way and I honestly cannot chose one over the others. I would just recommend, if you don’t mind spicyiness, to pay the additional twenty yen to get the spicy miso side spoon (in case you take the naka naka or tori paitan) - you can then try it and chose whether you want to add some or not. Interestingly, since the naka naka is a mix between a tori paitan with shoyu tare and a shio ramen, if you order it with the spicy miso spoon, you will then get a rare example of a spicy shio-shoyu-tori paitan-miso ramen! Try to make sense of the traditional four categories of ramen after that... Will a shop go further and add some niboshi and tonkotsu to the mix?

More info on ramendb.

Other reviews: Friends in Ramen

Tensonkorin (Kobe-shi, Chuo-ku)

麺屋 天孫降臨
めんや てんそんこうりん
Menya Tensonkourin

Shio tsukemen: 14 / 20

Shio ramen (with egg): 15 / 20
(天降らーめん しお)

Shoyu ramen (with egg): 15 / 20
(天降らーめん しょうゆ)

Mazesoba: 16 / 20

I had tried this restaurant’s excellent reimen during the summer and I definitely wanted to come back to try their other dishes. The visit of my family was the perfect occasion: we ordered the regular (shio) tsukemen, shio ramen, shoyu ramen and mazemen. Basically the whole set! Let’s start with the tsukemen:

 
Broth: This broth suffers from shio tsukemen’s original sin: not enough taste. It was barely thicker than the shio ramen broth (although more salty and concentrated), which is clearly not enough for a tsukemen. Pleasant, but really lacks some taste.

Noodles: Firm, thinner than the regular tsukemen’s noodles (which is a good thing in a shio tsukemen, as the broth does not stick so much), with a square section, and good.

Meat: A thin slice of meat with some pleasant fat, relatively unremarkable though.

Toppings: A few thick menma, quite fibrous and juicy, excellent. Some microgreens and white negi.

Soup wari: You get some cloudy, thin broth - did I perceive some mushroom notes? Mixing it with the broth made the broth thinner than the shio ramen’s.

Let's continue with the shio and shoyu ramen. Can you guess which one is which?

The shio ramen had thinner noodles than the tsukemen, too soft (why don’t they actually use their tsukemen’s noodles? they would also fit in the ramen). The broth was similar but better, relatively thick for a shio broth (somehow intermediate between a shio and a tori paitan), buttery in taste. There were two halves of an ajitama, well-cooked, although not so tasteful. As you can guess from the picture, the shoyu ramen was extremely similar to the shio, with, well, some added shoyu.

Finally, the mazemen was very good, with the same high quality noodles as in the tsukemen, and with some raw egg and good meat - the whole thing was relatively spicy. All dishes had the same kind of high-quality menma.

Overall, the mazemen had, as often, my preference. The shio (or shoyu) ramen is also recommended, though - but you can definitely skip the egg. Their tsukemen is not bad, but you can give it a pass. And when watching the website, I realize that I missed their tonkotsu-tori-shoyu. Have to come back there some time!

More info on ramendb.

Hototogisu (Tokyo, Shibuya-ku)

SOBAHOUSE金色不如帰
そばはうすこんじきほととぎす

Shoyu ramen (+ ontama and yakinori): 18 / 20

Hototogisu had been on my radar for quite some time already, but I never found the occasion to push a couple of stations west from Shinjuku to go there. Finally it was time to try this monument of the ramen world and I went there around 1 pm on a wednesday. Twenty minutes after starting queuing, I could order and seat in the pleasant restaurant; ten minutes later, my soup arrived - the shoyu with ontama and yakinori.

Eating at Hototogisu was a quite holistic experience, and because of this, I should change a bit my usual, analytical way of presenting ramen. The first sips and bites were slightly disappointing: the soup tasted relatively mild, the noodles were slightly too soft and the meat was nothing remarkable. However, as I continued eating, the full potential of all these ingredients started to express and they blended in a truly wonderful way. The shoyu broth, flavored with clam as you will read everywhere (honestly, I would not have identified the taste) had a remarkable sweetness and thin smoothness, which was perfectly accompanied by the relatively soft noodles - it felt like biting on some wadding; the firm chashu, though not exceptional, brought some texture in this ocean of softness, and the four slices of yakinori a pleasant crispyness. The menma were absolutely remarkable: thick, soft, mild and a bit sweet, very juicy - some of the best I’ve ever eaten; some additional, thinner menma and negi were sprinkled among the noodles. Finally, the ajitama was also a model: the tasty white revealed an interesting gradation in cooking, with a very firm edge, and a more liquid inner part; the yolk was gooey at places, slightly firmer at other, but pleasant everywhere. This ajitama was a rainbow of taste.

The whole thing infused a homogeneity and a coherence that I rarely tasted anywhere - eating this with Prince’s Purple Rain on the radio, in front of this bright white counter surrounded by a pitck black atmosphere, made me feel like I just had fallen in some kind of alternative dimension. Shoyu may not be my favourite broth flavor, the meat may not be perfect, but this is a remarkable bowl that you have to try.

More info on ramendb.

Other links: Ramen Adventures, Gastrolust, Confused abc, Foodsaketokyo, Timeout

Tomita Shokudo (Chiba-ken, Matsudo-shi)

松戸中華そば 富田食堂
まつどちゅうかそば とみたしょくどう 

Tsukesoba (with ajitama): 17 / 20

It is kind of painful to hear, after 50 minutes spent in the train, that the ramen shop you came to visit is exceptionally closed today because of some problem with the air-con system. It is even more painful when this shop happens to be Japane's most highly rated ramen joint, namely Tomita. Turning with sadness to my ramendb app on my phone to see if there was anything else valuable in the area, I discovered a spin-off of the restaurant, Tomita Shokudou. Let’s try it!

Broth: In contrast with Tomita's tonkotsu gyokai, the broth is here a slightly sweet shoyu. Although it does not have the kotteri structure of a tonkotsu gyokai broth, it sticked decently to the noodles. Adding the wari-soup at the end gave it a delicious, slightly burned taste.

Noodles: Relatively thin for a tsukemen - I presume that it fits better with a broth less sticky than a tonkotsu gyokai - but very pleasantly firm.

Meat: A slice of pork chashu that was really the letdown of this bowl, too fat and nothing exceptional; and a slice of tender and tasty, slightly peppery chicken, that saved the meaty part of this bowl.

Egg: Very flavorful white part, and an excellent gooey yolk. Very well cooked.

Toppings: Some tender, melting peppery menma - some of the best I’ve ever eaten. A few slices of wakame.

This was an excellent bowl - with a better pork chashu, it would have deserved an 18. If you want to try a tsukemen a bit different from your usual tonkotsu gyokai fix, that’s the place to go; you can also consider it in case there is too much queue at Tomita's main shop - that might happen, on the days when the air-con is not broken...

More information on ramendb.

Other reviews: Enjoy Ramen