There are. The popularity of ramen bars is on the rise in the US.
But tastes always differ and it can be hard to start a trend or break into a saturated market.
No, but it sounds good. My usual place is Kumako in Japan Town in SJ. The chef is Chinese, so it has some Chinese influenced choices, too. But oh-so-good on a chilly winter day! It’s a total dive, btw, so you have to not mind that. Very popular with SJ State students.
Y’know, looking at the OP again, I wonder. grude - if you’ve seen these places, why not just try one and find out what the deal is? Get whatever the most standard menu offering is. Those are often the best, especially if you don’t know what you particularly like.
Or they just want to go out to eat, and they like ramen?
They have. I know of several in the Boston area.
One thing that hasn’t been mentioned but perhaps should be is that real ramen is pretty damn cheap in Japan. You’re going to pay like $10 at the most, probably less.
I’d be wary of any ramen place that offered more than one kind of broth. A good place will specialize.
It annoys me more that Pho places which serve real broth have expanded outside Japan. Ramen is much tastier than Pho.
There’s one slated to open in Des Moines in July or August and it is pretty far from a major metropolitan city, less than 600,000 people.
Well, like most things Japanese, the effort and the craftsmanship involved in making these things is much better than the things themselves.
I can’t imagine anyone slicing meat in such a way as to make Shaved Montreal Smoke Meat - least wise not in the 1500s.
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Pho, being from Vietnam (and currently servicing the enormous Vietnamese expat population here), started outside Japan.
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Being Vietnamese myself, my mileage regarding the relative merits of the two dishes obviously varies. (I could eat pho literally every day without a second thought.) “Real” ramen is awesome, though. Hell, for that matter, so is the instant stuff, if you dress it up with a little sesame oil and hot sauce.
I think that the fond recollections of living on ramen in college could be an advantage when opening a ramen restaurant, the same way that a childhood love of McDonald’s leads one to seek out more sophisticated burgers in adulthood.
lmao
no ramen places in the USA? there’s gotta be 50+ ramen restaurants in the LA area
and ramen is not easy to make. it’s really time consuming. broths take anywhere from 12 - 24 hours to make.
I wouldn’t call making ramen broth exceptionally difficult. Time consuming? Sure, making dashi certainly involves boiling seaweed and fish flakes for a hell of a long time. But it’s not like some recipes where letting the temperature get just too high ruins the whole thing or anything. E: Miso is a bit more intense, though.
Making decent to good ramen at home isn’t too difficult. However, getting the same quality as good restaurants is not just time consuming, it’s downright impractical. This is more true for some types of ramen than others. For instance, to properly make a Hakata-style tonkotsu soup, you need to get the blood out of pig bones by boiling them and constantly scooping out the foam. Then, you clean them and dry them. Then, you smash them to pieces with a hammer, and then you boil them again – for 12 to 24 hours. That’s probably the most difficult soup to make, but many restaurants do simmer their broths for several hours, requiring frequent monitoring and attention to remove foam, and add ingredients at the right time.
Ramen is not made with Japanese bonito dashi (which typically takes, BTW, only a few minutes to make.) Bonito flakes and seaweed can be added to the soup, but the most traditional recipes call for chicken broth. Pork or beef bones are also common, and as anyone who has seen Tampopo knows, the exact ingredients that go in the soup can be a tightly guarded secret.
You can buy pretty decent noodles at the supermarket, and people do make it at home, but when you can have a great bowl of the stuff for the equivalent of 6 to 7 dollars, most of the time, it’s not worth the trouble.
There are something like 20,000 ramen restaurants in Tokyo alone. The competition is such that to even survive, you have to be very good. You have to be very unlucky to have bad ramen in Tokyo. Also, since it’s so popular, customers are very demanding and also very good at telling the subtle differences between different restaurants.
I was actually thinking of Udon when I mentioned dashi, derp. Though I have made a couple varieties of homemade ramen too, though you’re right that the difficulty depends on kind. Shoyu is pretty straightforward.
Yeah, it’s a huge generalisation, but for ramen, the soup makes the difference, and for udon, it’s the noodles. Udon (with frozen or dry noodles) is a much more common home-made food than ramen.
a) Ramen broth tends not to be dashi-based
b) No, proper dashidoesn’t involve long boiling.
c) I see jovan already covered both points. Still posting just for that link…also check outthis other oneon the best ramen.
I currently live in Japan, and have done so for a combined total of 8 years now. Ramen from a good noodle shop is…so insanely good, I don’t even have words. When I was recently ill with a fever, I specifically sent the Mister out for spicy ramen, and while it didn’t cure me, it made me feel tons better.
Y’all are making me crave ramen, and my favorite joint is closed on Tuesdays. I’ll have to wait for tomorrow.
They do a good tonkotsu broth, and put halves of runny soft-boiled eggs in the bowl with the roast pork and other toppings. On the tables, they place sesame-seed grinders and pots of spicy pickled mustard greens as their unique condiments offering.
There are indeed several ramen places in the LA area, including Little Tokyo, the area near Sawtelle Boulevard, Gardena and Torrance. There is also an annual ramen festival, in which several food trucks serve ramen and you pay about $8 per bowl. A couple ramen restaurants I’ve tried and loved are Shin-Sen-Gumi and Orochon, both in Little Tokyo.