The Ramen We Almost Took Off the Menu

Ramen Ishida is at 122 Ludlow Street. We are at 121. He was on this block before we were.

That fact shaped our menu for years, and it is the reason this post exists.

For a Long Time We Did Not Serve Ramen

I did not want to compete with the guy across the street, and I did not want to step on his toes. He was here first and he does one thing at a very high level.

So we served udon instead. Different noodle, different bowl, no overlap.

Udon turned out to be a hard sell in America. Plenty of people here have never had it and do not know what to expect from it, and a thick, soft wheat noodle in a clear broth is not what most people walk into a Japanese restaurant looking for. It is a great thing. It is not a thing most Americans order.

Then People Kept Asking

The other half of it is that Ishida's ramen is light and elegant. That is his style and he is very good at it.

What kept happening is that guests would come to us and ask whether we had a thicker tonkotsu ramen. Not instead of his. In addition to his.

We got asked enough times that eventually it stopped being a question about whether we wanted to be a ramen shop and started being a question about whether we were listening.

So we put ramen on the menu.

The First Version Was Basic on Purpose

I want to be straightforward about what that first ramen was.

We bought the broth in. The ingredients were simple. It was not ambitious, and it was not meant to be.

We are an izakaya. That is a Japanese pub, and in Japan the food at a pub exists to go with drinking. The ramen was there to soak up the alcohol at the end of the night, which is a real and honorable job that a bowl of noodles does in Japan every single night.

For what it was, and for the price, I still think it was fine.

The Feedback Was Not Great

It did not land, and I understand why.

Cheap izakaya ramen is a category that exists in Japan and does not really exist here. People in New York do not have a mental slot for a modest bowl at the end of a night of drinking. What they have is ramen restaurants, and so we got compared to ramen restaurants.

Totto Ramen came up a lot. And honestly, to this day, my personal opinion is that they are better at ramen than I am. I am not a master ramen chef. There are people like Ishida who have given their entire working lives to this one dish, and I have not.

That is not false modesty, it is just the situation. It also left us with a decision.

Improve It or Cut It

Two options. Take the ramen off the menu, or overhaul it.

We overhauled it.

What Is Actually in a Bowl of Ramen

To explain what we changed, I need to explain how a bowl is built, because most people think ramen is broth plus toppings and it is not.

There are four parts.

The broth is the liquid base. Pork bone, chicken, vegetable, whatever it is built on.

The tare is the seasoning base, a concentrated liquid that goes into the empty bowl before the broth is poured on top. This is the part almost nobody outside the industry knows about, and here is the fact that shows how much it matters: when a menu says shoyu ramen, the shoyu refers to the tare, not the broth. Two shoyu ramens at two different shops can be built on completely different broths. The bowl is named after the tare.

The aroma oil, kōmi-abura, is infused with aromatics and floats on top because oil and water do not mix. It does three jobs in sequence: it is the first thing you smell when the bowl lands, it is the aroma coming up through your nose while you drink the soup, and it is what you get again when you slurp the noodles.

The noodles are chūkamen, alkaline wheat noodles made with kansui, which is what gives them their springiness, their yellow color and their particular chew.

What We Buy and What We Make

Here is our honest split.

We buy in the bone broth and the noodles. Making bone broth properly is a full-time operation and so is noodle production, and we are not going to pretend otherwise.

Everything else, we make. We take that bone broth and season it ourselves in house, and then we build our own aroma oils to go on top.

If you look back at the four components, that means we are making the two layers that determine what the bowl actually tastes like. That is not a shortcut. That is the part where a ramen has an identity at all, and it is why our bowls do not taste like anyone else's.

The Chili Oil

The spicy one is built on a chili oil we make here, with our own blend of chilies and spices.

It is not a heat contest. The point of a chili oil as an aroma oil is that the fat carries the capsaicin and the aromatics together, so the spice arrives as flavor rather than as a wall.

Mayu, the Magic Oil

The black garlic ramen is my favorite thing we did in that overhaul, and it has a real lineage behind it.

The oil is made by first dehydrating sliced garlic, then cooking it in oil at a very low temperature for a long time until it goes black, essentially to charcoal. Then it gets blended and seasoned, and that becomes the aroma oil for the bowl.

In Japan this is called mayu, and it is the signature of Kumamoto ramen. The name is the good part: it comes from mahō no abura, magic oil, because it makes a bowl taste unreasonably better than it has any right to. It is credited to Keika in Kumamoto, whose second-generation owner named it, and the technique itself traces back to a seasoning oil from Taiwan.

The reason it works is that burnt garlic and pork bone broth belong together. Garlic taken that far stops being sharp and turns bitter, roasted and almost coffee-like, and that bitterness cuts through a rich broth in a way nothing else does.

Getting it right is mostly patience. Too hot and it is acrid, not far enough and it is just fried garlic.

The Vegan Bowls

Both the spicy and the black garlic are available vegan.

I cannot take credit for those. The vegan broth and that whole side of the menu were designed by Mitch San, not by me, and they are his work.

And the Brown Butter One

The newest addition is the brown butter miso, which came out of somewhere else entirely and has its own post.

Try It at Juraku

Ramen is on the menu at Izakaya Juraku, Lower East Side. Spicy, black garlic, brown butter miso, and vegan versions of the first two.

And if you want a light, elegant bowl from someone who has dedicated his life to it, he is directly across the street and you should go.

See the rest of the menu.