The first rule of the serious ramen hunter: look everywhere, even in places that don’t look like ramen shops. This is how, in January, I found myself inhaling noodles at a cluster of tables shoved into the center of a bagel shop in Long Island City, Queens.
This was Mu Ramen, Joshua and Heidy Smookler’s floating restaurant, which has already sailed on from the bagel shop and is now docking in various locations, some of them evidently without permits, until it establishes a permanent mooring in the neighborhood later this year. Mr. Smookler does the cooking. He worked in Per Se’s kitchen, and his ramen, which hews to tradition, shows a Kelleresque level of fussing over details. The bamboo is fresh and sweetly crisp; the spoons are ceramic; the tables are set with pots of fermented mustard greens with chile flakes and habaneros, Mu’s take on a traditional mix-in from Hakata, Japan, that few New York shops offer.
The Ramen Hunt Credit Evan Sung for The New York Times
Mu’s cloudy tonkotsu broth, simmered with pork bones for most of a day, stopped me cold. It had the body of old-fashioned, cream-on-top milk from a tiny dairy. Of course it clings to the thin, straight, firm noodles, which do a little jitterbug as you reel them into your mouth. (Boil ramen noodles too long and they won’t even slow dance.) Mu’s other ramen was spicy miso, with fatter noodles that were even more animated, and a broth that was just as lush, with a hint of sweetness and a lingering burn. The rumors were true: this movable ramen shop was already near the top in a very competitive field.
Ten years ago, when you told New Yorkers you were going to eat Japanese noodles, nearly everyone pictured soba. When you say it now, half your friends will ask which ramen-ya is your favorite and the other half will be in line in front of you.
The ramen belt, once tightly buckled around the East Village, now loops from Fort Lee, N.J., to Queens and Brooklyn. New shops set up business behind foggy windows every few weeks, some run by operators straight from Japan, some by American-born chefs versed in the occult arts of chashu and tonkotsu. Noodle fanatics share their sightings of new mutant variants and hoard secret addresses for after-midnight slurping.
The shift from soba connoisseurship to ramen mania is so thorough it can’t be called a trend anymore. It embodies bigger changes in the way New Yorkers eat. Consider: Soba noodles are prized for their delicacy, ramen broth for its hearty, salty, head-filling intensity. Soba is minimalist, with scallions and red grains of togarashi scattered over a broth made from seaweed and dried fish. Ramen’s lavish garnishes almost always feature slices of pork swimming in a slick of melted animal fat above the liquid you get when you boil great heaps of meat and bones. The best soba is expensive and is found in restaurants with a temple-like serenity. Ramen is cheap and is the fuel of late-night drunken sprees.
Rising like steam from these ceramic bowls is, in short, the city’s movement from hushed fine dining to noisy eat-and-run joints; from subtle flavors to assertive ones; from a dining scene in which pork played almost no role to one in which it was the emperor of meats.
This is a lot of cargo for noodle soup. In the end, though, spinning theories about ramen isn’t as much fun as tracking down a great bowl, so that’s what I’ve been doing lately. I’ve checked up on the older standard-bearers and made the acquaintance of some new, highly compelling operators.
The closest rival to the ramen bliss Mu offered inside a bagel shop was at a counter inside a food hall in Hell’s Kitchen. I recently reviewed the hall, Gotham West Market, so I’ll keep this brief: Ivan Ramen Slurp Shop is exceptional, serving scaldingly hot, deeply flavorful broths with noodles that get their satisfying heartiness from rye flour. This year a flagship Ivan Ramen restaurant will open on the Lower East Side. I can’t wait to pit it against Mu Ramen and see which comes out ahead. For the moment, Mu has the edge.
It’s getting hard to keep track of all the ramen shops that, like Mu, camp out inside other businesses. A sushi place on West Houston Street has been playing host to Benkei Ramen after midnights and on Sunday evenings since last year. Early reports were enthusiastic, but my tonkotsu ramen was a near miss. The cloudy, pork-forward broth was almost sticky with flavorful fat, yet it slid right off the noodles, which weren’t interested in clinging to anything except one another.
The late-night ramen in an empty sushi bar to beat remains Ramen Sanshiro. For the past few years, Midtown noodle watchers have waited for the red paper lantern that sways from the awning of Restaurant SEO after 11 p.m. The shio ramen there is somewhat lean, but makes up for it with a bright, unusually pure chicken-soup flavor.
If after-hours ramen can piggyback on a sushi bar, why not on a Japanese-Korean barbecue grill? The sign on the door of Takashi in the West Village one recent Saturday at midnight read, “Sorry, we’re closed.” I ignored it, and took a reserved seat at the counter.
Takashi is wholly devoted to beef. So is its ramen, equipped with beef belly in place of pork, a stock made from beef bones and Cheerio-size rings of slow-fried beef intestine. I’m told that they love slow-fried intestines in Osaka, the hometown of the restaurant’s chef, Takashi Inoue. After crunching on a few bits, I’d had enough of their spooky, below-decks flavor. I focused instead on the fantastic belly and broth, which had a lip-smacking gravity that comes from stirring in melted collagen. According to the menu, collagen “helps with body strength and flexibility.” I still can’t bend my foot behind my ear, but I could easily bench-press another bowl of Takashi’s ramen.
For those who can’t stay up past midnight, there is another choice. Starting at 9 p.m., Hanjan, a Korean restaurant that opened about a year ago on West 26th Street, ladles out a profoundly warming ramen derived from street stalls in Seoul. The squiggly, lively noodles come in a bone broth swirled with so much spicy chile paste, it’s the color of raw hamburger.
Hanjan’s Korean ramen and Takashi’s beef ramen suggest the ramen market has become broadly diversified. At Hide-Chan in Midtown, the pork-rich tonkotsu can be ordered with a dose of black oil made from charred garlic with an eye-watering spritz of ground red chiles. The bowl looks like a tiny replay of the Deepwater Horizon spill, but it’s riveting, worth the time you invariably spend on the steep, narrow staircase waiting for admission to this second-story noodle haven.
A little less compelling, but still very good, are two mutant ramens at a Chinatown shop that opened without the typical frenzy last summer. An offshoot of a ramen-ya in Tokyo, Bassanova is spare and white, with “The Kinfolk Table” cookbook and other totems of Greenpoint chic stacked on a communal table. Bassanova is best known for its green curry ramen. While it didn’t have the aromatic punch of its role models in Thailand, it was still warming and complex, with loads of fried garlic among the excellent roast pork, okra and shrimp. I was more taken with the ramen topped with lemon slices, especially after the server went at it with a pepper grinder. What do lemons and black pepper have to do with ramen? Nothing, but they are magically good in this one.
Credit Tony Cenicola/The New York Times
Another off-label use for ramen has been gathering strength in Japan and is a good bet to take off in New York: mazemen. Ramen without the slurp, mazemen has no broth, getting its flavor elsewhere. At Ivan Ramen, this can be from a mash of eggplant and chiles or, in my favorite example of the genre, caramelized garlic pulp. In a frequent special at Chuko, in Prospect Heights, Brooklyn, the mentaiko mazemen is tossed with bacon, scallions, butter and cod roe; imagine spaghetti carbonara with a seaside whiff of brine. The bacon-and-egg mazemen at Yuji Ramen, which has outlets inside two Whole Foods Markets, comes even closer to carbonara. It strikes me as too sweet, as does the one with cured salmon and runny Camembert, but both have potential as hangover cures.
At this point in my outline, a note says “End-to-end length of all noodles I ate expressed as distance between two Japanese cities.” I never did the math, but I’m not sure now that Japan is big enough to contain my total ramen mileage, especially once I started checking in on old standbys.
Ippudo NY: Still the best looking ramen-ya. Still irresistibly cheerful. Still very good. The broth is hot enough to sterilize surgical tools and the noodles are exceptionally springy.
Totto Ramen: The shadowy, steamy, low-ceilinged, quasi-illicit “Blade Runner” atmosphere is so cool that it’s hard to be clinical about the actual soups. But for traditional ramen that hasn’t been cheffed-up, this is the place.
Minca: Used to be my touchstone because the broths had a classical balance. But last month, the soy level in shoyu ramen was seriously out of whack.
Rai Rai Ken: Some minor technical demerits, especially for cold garnishes. But the shoyu broth was reasonably rich and the noodles had a playful snap, for the pre-Momofuku price of $ 10.
Momofuku Noodle Bar: In the early days, David Chang served his ramen with a poached egg, and you could stir the yolk into the soup. Now the egg is cooked until the yolk sets, so you are out of luck if, like me, you find the broth too lean and angular, oily without being rich. As in the beginning, the extras are the best part, like the pork belly and pulled shoulder.
Momofuku has been imitated so many times in so many cities that it’s easy to forget how many of its features were borrowed from Japanese ramen-yas: Counters. Noise. Late nights. Pork. No reservations.
Yet the last stop on my ramen hunt came without any of those things. I made a reservation to eat in the sunny, orderly dining room of Kajitsu, where ramen is served only at lunch. Ryota Ueshima, the chef, prepares traditional Japanese shojin cuisine, which does not include animals and the ingredients they give us.
There are no pork bones in the ramen broth and no sliced pork on top of the noodles, although there is wheat gluten in pork drag. (It almost passes until you taste it.) The other garnishes had more to offer, like unexpectedly savory tree ear mushrooms and fresh bamboo even crisper and sweeter than Mu’s.
The broth is based on miso, seaweed and mushrooms, and reminded me of a Thai yellow curry in color and in its thickness. I wouldn’t slurp this ramen without wearing a poncho, but it had a toasty, slightly nutty flavor that I loved, backed by a slow pulse of chile heat. Kajitsu upended all my assumptions about ramen except the most basic one: look everywhere. In New York, the hunt is getting interesting.
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