Review #3 Seven minutes with the ramen professor. Outside Nagoya Meitetsu Station.

On the short train ride from Sakae to Nagoya, I talk myself out of a second bowl of ramen for the day. Then on the stairs leading towards Nagoya Station concourse from the Higashiama subway, pangs of hunger strike me coinciding with the realisation that I've missed my connecting train. Ignoring the fact that my complexion's already considerably oilier than thismorning, surely thanks to my Kuma-chan pilgrimage at lunch time, I decide to pay a visit to the ramen professor.



Now if you can imagine a bespectacled Doc from Back to the Future churning out ramen rather than wormhole seeking Deloreans, also much less chatty and super fast and efficient, you'll have a reasonably acurate mental sketch of this legendary Nagoya pavement chef.

To ensure you comprehend my word picture, here you can watch him in his element (or rather hunched over gas rings) whipping up a ramen typhoon, oodles of noodles, menma, charshu revealed from trick wooden drawers all for a mere ¥500 a bowl.



So how does it taste? Classic syoyu ramen, springy hosomen noodles, pipping hot steaming in the chilled Friday eening air. I drank all my soup. 'Cause I'm a guts. I'm now on the (next) train home and crazy thirsty. But you're not meant to drink all the soup, so my bad.

The ramen prof gets 11/10 for gruffness, 12/10 for sheer uber tornadic (typhoonic?) speed 10/10 for lifting the spirits of work weary Nagoyans on their way home. 7/10 for the ramen eating experience itself.

Review # 2 Kuma-chan, Nagoya Ekimae, underground shopping district.

The waitress, already pretty high strung, ready to leap out at customers to take orders and dispense water, decided to freak out completely when I attempted to order Tamago topping (a simple boiled egg) and proceeded to yell "Nama tamago!!!!" to the chefs. And the complete horror of the guy sitting next to me,he rabidly changed seats."Nama tamago!!!!" = "Raw egg". I was feeling rather beat after a busy morning taking Ann to the doctor then daycare then rushing to Fushimi for a job interview. Some fun filled business English classes to flll out my days and pay for my ramen and camera lens addictions. So I didn't bother changing my order and I hoped that maybe, like at Yoshinoya when one orders "Nama tamago" it might come in a separate little bowl.

Nup.

Ooops. There's a raw egg in my soup. And it's all my fault.

Never mind. I made a noodley cave and buried it at the back of my bowl, banking on the hot broth poaching it slightly.

Anyway, the ramen that I ordered is called Paripari niniku ramen. Garlic flavoured broth with fantastically yummy cubes of baked charshu (roast pork) cooked in an oven 'til they're crunchy.

The palate was a pleasant mix of garlic, pork, miso, dried chillies, bean sprouts, and leek greens.
The noodles are hand made I think and they have a beautiful egg pasta smell to them. They're very soft, but perfect and don't fall apart in the soup. they're square cut noodles, yellower than most ramen out there. They have a special, unique flavour that I adore and crave from time to time, though I think this was only my third visit to Kuma-chan.



A man came in and ordered miso butter ramen, a much prettier arangement than my bowl with 2 flat 2 cm sqare dobs of butter floating on top. He stired them in with his chopsticks creating a golden slick of goodness accross the surface of the pale brown broth.

Left: Toukibi ramen (corn).
Right: Miso butter ramen.



Another man odered ramen with a smaller bowl of dipping soup, tsuke-men, such is often served cold in summer. I guess here they serve it cold all year as he explicitly asked for it to be served hot.

Tsuke-men at lower left. Tororo (sticky mountain potato) and soba noodles are

next to it. Top upper shelf displays gyoza on the left and curry ramen.

A young woman with glasses sat at the counter and ordered charshu-men roast pork with wakame, a large
pile of wet seaweed, vibrant green, that she mixed through.

Compared to last week's Ichiran episode, Kuma-chan is spacious. One bloke had his broadsheet unfolded, 2 women were reading books, elbow and leg room were not at a premium. That said, the place is not big. I counted 29 padded bar stools, 12 along walls, 10 around a central oblong cut piece of tree trunk, 7 along the counter adjoining the kitchen. There were also some neglected mangrove palms, I found myself wondering how they manage to photosynthesize so far underground.

The spicy garlic soup gets a 7/10. Their gyoza are quite oily and lacking in flavour, but a nice crunch to them, 5/10. The noodles are amazing, I've never tried anything like them elsewhere, 9.5/10.

Cost: Pari pari ninicu ramen: ¥760, gyoza ¥300. Accidental raw egg: ¥50 Total: ¥1110.

Very highly recommended.

Special thanks to a former student, Chikayasu Sato who first told me about Kuma-chan.

Getting there:



Click here to enlarge.


Basically the entrance is directly across the main road from the Nana-chan statue. But if you crossed there, you'd surely perish, squashed by myriad taxis and miss out on some really fantastic ramen. There is a fluro orange number 1 next to the entrance.

At the base of the stairs you'll be greeted by a large pole, walk to the right for about 3 meters, then turn left down the big hallway.

Marvel at the shiny and expensive samurai swords.
Wander in and buy me a lovely pair of metal samurai chopsticks
for ¥40,000 if you're feeling generous.

No, seriously, you look hungry. Keep walking, almost there...

Can you see it? It's there on the right, just beyond the au Kaytai shop.

Ta da!! You made it. Now go eat!

Here are the plastic displays for your consideration.

Review # 1. Ichiran Sakae, Nagoya. Near Nadiya Park Loft Building.

A guy called Josh who I used to brew beer with once told me how much he liked going to Ichiran ramen in Sakae. After a long day face to face with students, he enjoyed the privacy and solitude of eating ramen in his own private wooden booth. His description of the place, a long ramen bar divided every meter or so by brown wooden barricades had long intrigued me. I went looking for it on several occasions to no avail. All I knew was that it was 'near the Loft building'. So is half of Sakae. And I don't live in Nagoya and I still get lost in the back streets of down town even after 4 years.

On Friday night I was wandering, nearly delerious with hunger after a 6 hour stint at our Company's La Chic school, LC basically being another posh mall for the Nagoya fashionista with disposable incomes to burn.

And there it was! A beacon of ramen-goodness in the cold night.











I was greeted with a familiar looking ticket machine along with a rather unfamiliar abundance of both photos and English to help me along. There was only one 'ramen' button. I also purchased an egg and kaiedama, extra noodles to replenish my soup after scoffing the first lot, a Kyushu institution.
My photo of the ticket machine isn't the best, but here it is anyway for what it's worth.













My imagination based on others' descriptions usually far exceeds what I end up finding, but this joint pretty much lived up to what Josh had described.












A long line of booths, each with about as much space as one gets with a cramped cattle-class plane seat. Whilst standing it's easy enough to survey the place, but the booths have been laid out in such a way that when sitting, you are in your own sharp cornered ramen eating coccoon. Looking up all I could see above the dark wooden panneling was a sea of legless red crabs cruising about. Actually, they were the head scarves of the busy Friday night kitchen crew.











Through the opening at the back of the booth I handed over my tickets and was presented with a tiny oblong metal dish for claiming my extra noodles when required. I also got a piece of paper and which was basically a ramen augmentation sheet. A red pen on a metal chain was there for me to circle my selections. Everything was bi-lingual. I could choose how my noodles were to be cooked (I chose 'hard') The strength of the broth flavour, how much garlic and signature spicy 'special sauce' was to be added.












There was a promise that whatever combination I selected, the cost would be ¥790. Sweet!

After pressing a small flashing square button to return the form to a face-unseen ramen preparing droid, a softboiled egg in its shell was delivered, complete with a small piece of paper featuring visual instructions for optimum peeling success.












Also a sachet of salt along with a small bowl for discarding the egg shell.

A few minutes later my ramen arrived. This too was an odd, almost magical experience. It was not carried to my booth's window, rather lifted from under it, as if it had slid in on a different level or perhaps a conveyor belt. I think these guys must use the same cabinet maker as Seifried and Roy.




As a final theatrical flourish, a small bamboo blind was lowered to further enhance my privacy.

The special sauce was nice and spicy, next time I'll order twice as much. It was a similar colour to the Korean kotchujan, but with more of a red peppery taste (a bit like the French/Moroccan harissa paste in a tube you can buy for adding spice to cous cous dishes; though less firey). The noodles were good and firm but softened quickly in the hot broth. The medium flavour was perfect, as was the medium amount of pork fat I'd requested. The whole clove of crushed garlic was just about right too. I have 2 criticisms. There was a stingy amount of pork. Next time I'll pay the ¥160 or so for an extra serve. Also, I like about 1/3 more soup than was given. After the kaiedama I polished off the bowl and probably could've eaten another one, but decided neither my wasteline nor arteries would benefit. It was also approaching last train home o'clock.

On the Joel-O-meter I rate the bowl of ramen 8 out of 10. With the quaintness of the dining experience scoring a 9.5.

Very high praise indeed. I thought it was much tastier and better value than Ippudo, where I have eaten around 10 times. But I did miss being able to people watch from within my booth. I also suffered from leg and knee cramps, but at 6'1" this is par for the course for me in Japan. Give Icharan a try and post your thougts in the comments.









Copu! (Cups) I laughed at this Bat Cave-esque sign.













So many instructions...

Another bowl downed.