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$25 AND UNDER; East Village Noodles, All the Way From Japan
By ERIC ASIMOV
Published: July 14, 2004, Wednesday
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FOR many Japanese, ramen is not so much a noodle dish as an obsession. Americans know ramen as the savior of college students, who, equipped with only hot plate, dried noodles and powdered broth, whip up late-night snacks. This packaged meal has little to do with the Japanese conception of ramen, which is more akin to Mom's chicken soup, painstakingly and lovingly prepared and consumed with a sense of comfort and well-being.
Not that Japanese mothers are all slaving over the pot. In Japan, most ramen is consumed at shops and stands that dot the cities. And, just as my parents, when traveling overseas, told me they craved the sort of Jewish foods that they rarely ate at home in New York, many Japanese travelers and expatriates who experience ramen lust may simply be longing for the comforts of home.
One such expat is Shigeto Kamada, a musician, who says he despaired of finding good ramen in New York. So he taught himself to make it by reading books and watching videos. Now he is satisfying similar appetites at Minca, a little ramen shop he opened about a month ago in the East Village.
Mr. Kamada calls Minca a ramen factory, but there is little about the place that suggests an assembly line. It is just a storefront with four or five tables and eight or so seats at a counter. Tiny halogen spotlights hang from the ceiling, and unusual selections from Mr. Kamada's art collection adorn the brick walls.
Many people assume that ramen means noodles, but noodles are only one component of the complete ramen dish. The noodles themselves are of the type called chukasoba, or Chinese-style soba noodles. Unlike soba noodles, which are made of buckwheat, curly chukasoba noodles are wheat and have a springy elasticity that lets them remain squiggly even when cooked.
Mr. Kamada uses dried, portioned noodles delivered from Japan. Though crucial to ramen, the noodles are the easy part. Far more difficult is the soup. Mr. Kamada uses 80 percent pork bones and 20 percent chicken bones to prepare his broth, which he boils for hours until it achieves a light, velvety texture, a milky color and an intense porkiness.
If you take a seat at the bar and order the basic ramen ($8.50), you can watch Mr. Kamada assemble it before you. First, he puts a portion of the noodles in a pot of boiling water. Then, he opens a white vessel on his work counter, revealing dozens of hard-cooked eggs steeping in a soy sauce. With chopsticks he plucks one out and slices it lengthwise.
From another pot he pours the fragrant broth into a blue earthenware bowl. He adds the egg, a selection of ''mountain vegetables,'' which look like curly mushrooms, and salt and pepper. He tosses in the noodles and uncovers a long pan filled with cooked pork, sliced ultrathin. Eying the pork carefully, he selects a few slices and floats them on top of the broth. Finally, he adds a small sheet of nori seaweed.
On a summer day, the ramen experience can be a bit like taking a steam bath. With soup spoon in one hand and chopsticks in the other, you alternate bites of savory pork; slurps of noodles; sips of the rich, peppery broth; and occasional tastes of egg, scallion and mountain vegetable. I like to add a jolt of spicy red hot sauce. Before long you can feel your face begin to flush, and beads of sweat break out on your forehead. Each bite feels like feeding the furnace, yet the ramen is so good that you do not want to stop.
Variations on the ramen theme include soy ramen ($8.50), with an extra dose of soy sauce in the broth, and chicken ramen ($8.50), which uses a lighter chicken-and-fish broth. You can have it tsukemen-style ($8.50), in which the noodles are served in a separate bowl. You dip the noodles in the soup before eating them. For a little more, you can have charshu ramen ($11.50), which is topped with six or seven slices of pork. Or you can try my favorite, toriniku ramen ($11.50), which is topped with meltingly soft chunks of pork belly and buttery tender leaves of green cabbage.
Preliminaries might include exceptionally delicate gyoza dumplings ($4.50), stuffed with pork and pungent cabbage, or a refreshing salad of julienned daikon ($4), dressed with a spicy sesame sauce. That's it. No dessert, no beer or wine (you can bring your own), just ramen.
For that, the predominantly Japanese clientele seems especially grateful.
Minca
536 East Fifth Street (Avenue B), East Village; (212) 505-8001.
((skinny))
need to eat here
Using His Noodle
Before he opened Momofuku Noodle Bar, David Chang spent months cooking and eating in Japan, where he learned that ramen is as diverse as American barbecue, and that variations are just as passionately debated among connoisseurs. So rather than attempt the impossible—making “real ramen” far from its authentic Japanese context—he’s come up with his own style, using ingredients like miso compound butter, eggs slowly poached in their shells, Greenmarket corn, and Berkshire pork. The result is a gently priced menu rooted in tradition but not enslaved by it, with a Pan-Asian twist in the form of additions like cold Korean buckwheat noodles and Chinese pork buns.
163 First Avenue
212-475-7899
((skinny))
Using His Noodle
Before he opened Momofuku Noodle Bar, David Chang spent months cooking and eating in Japan, where he learned that ramen is as diverse as American barbecue, and that variations are just as passionately debated among connoisseurs. So rather than attempt the impossible—making “real ramen” far from its authentic Japanese context—he’s come up with his own style, using ingredients like miso compound butter, eggs slowly poached in their shells, Greenmarket corn, and Berkshire pork. The result is a gently priced menu rooted in tradition but not enslaved by it, with a Pan-Asian twist in the form of additions like cold Korean buckwheat noodles and Chinese pork buns.
163 First Avenue
212-475-7899