It’s a good thing (at least here in the States) that a restaurant has to move to bigger quarters because they’re just “that” busy. Santa moved over the Thanksgiving break last year.
Yes, it’s bigger! But where’s the soul?
The old Santa Ramen was on B Street where parking was a serious pain. The new Santa Ramen is now in a mini mall on El Camino just south of the 92. Easier to get to but requires a commitment because it’s 30 miles away from San Francisco. On the plus side, there’s a Nijiya Market directly across the lot from Santa so you can go grocery shopping. Remember the 29th is “Meat Day”!
In a mini-mall! Next to the Shoe Pavillion…
The big fear when a restaurant moves to new digs is that the food will not be up to par as the old place was. Although these new digs lacks the character of the old place, I’m happy to say that the basics of Santa (tonkotsu ramen) is still its old decadent rich self.
The old standby when there’s no stewed pork. Still good!
The menu has been enlarged with a greater selection of appetizers than before. My bud and I had karaage and fried squid. But the big draw is the ramen with the milky, rich, indulgent tonkotsu broth! I mean look at the broth and the oil floating on top!
OK, so it’s “fat” floating on top. That’s what makes it taste good!
Santa has brought much of the old shop with them. The broth is still good. The food is still good. The noodles are still the thick kind and you have to special order 玉子 to go with your ramen. You don’t have to sign the waiting list anymore on non-peak days; it’s first come first serve now. But one constant still remains, to remind you that you ARE at Santa Ramen…
AAAAAAUUGGGGHHHHH! NOTFAIRNOTFAIRNOTFAIR!
You still need to get here early for stewed pork. I missed it this visit by 10 bloody minutes!!! *pout pout pout*
But I shall return!!!
Santa Ramen
1944 El Camino Real
San Mateo CA 94403
650-344-5918
Bourdain’s Advice taken in Shinjuku
On the first episode of No Reservations titled “why the French don’t suck”, Anthony Bourdain devotes part of the show to the simple joy of sticking your head into the door of a strange restaurant and finding bliss.
Of course, as it is with all TV shows, this segment was scripted. However, it still made the point of leaving your culinary comfort zone to try and find new places that can eventually become old places (and a new part of your comfort zone) and then you can continue the search for new places. It never ends, unless they outlaw good tasting reasonably priced food (like they seem like they’re trying to do back home in SF, NYC and other places).
My first visit to Tokyo and my indoctrination into the ramen world took place a few years back at a small ramen shop off of Koshu-Kaido dori, across from a Citibank down the hill from the south exit of JR Shinjuku-eki. The place is still there and I’ve made my usual visit.
But the other night, I was hungry and decided to expand my horizons. I noticed a small shop across the way from one of the many small computer shops that populate this part of Shinjuku.
It has the usual flags up, but none of them said “ramen” in katakana (which is the kana I can SORT OF read). Looking inside, there were lots of people and it LOOKED like a ramen place, but I wasn’t sure. So I continued to walk around, passing the mysterious place every 5 to 10 minutes, sneaking peeks through the wooden slats that cover the windows.
After 30 minutes of window shopping and indecision (and stomach grumbling), I walked in and took a seat and tried to figure out the elegant looking menu. Thankfully they had an english menu that was not as elegant looking and I was able to place an order for a bowl of shio ramen.
After the beer and the water, comes the shio!
It was a delicious broth, light and flavourful with just a touch of oil with the slices of toriniku and negi sitting majestically on the top with a sour plum.
So now this is one of my “must go” places now. And they play real jazz inside!
Ramen Santouka Shinjuku Minamiguchi
1st Floor, Nakaoki Building
1-18-5, Nishi-Shinjuku, Shinjuku-ku, Tokyo
New mall ramen…
This is always a welcome sight in my ramen-scarce area. This is Majikku Ramen in Daly City. It’s in that mall on Skyline where Ranch 99 and the KFC is. If you’re Asian and you live in San Francisco, chances are you know where this is and can get here blindfolded.
New Ramen shop! Sorta of in my area…
The sign above usually means, “come in and eat”. So I went this evening.
It was pretty busy because it was dinner time
The place had chill out lounge music which would be great for the kind of bars I like to frequent, but even though it’s not really ramen shop music, it worked with the decor which is very modern-y and new. That’s fine since this place has been open for only a few months.
Many things can make or break a ramen shop besides the actual food. The ramen is of course, the reason you go to a ramen shop but the service, the variety of food (or lack thereof) and the atmosphere can also make a place worthwhile.
Or it can break a place.
First the good stuff. Decent tonkotsu broth. Good flavor without the MSG hangover.
Here’s another added (and rare) feature here. Cha siu slices that are rich, flavourful and hella tender! The noodles were decently springy. I think I was here on a good night.
Makes your mouth water, dun it?
Before the ramen showed up, ordered some chicken yakatori and wasabi chicken from the Robata-Yaki menu. Both very good and worthy of piss alley in Shinjuku.
Great with beer!
Now the not so great. The miso ramen was extremely oversalted to the point of causing a salt/msg headache. Canned bamboo shoots in both bowls were rubbery and limp. But at least the noodles and cha siu kept their ramen-y goodness. Both bowls also came out not as hot as I’d like. My miso ramen friend didn’t have problems with the warmth of the bowl so that may be a matter of personal preference.
The bowl looks good…and the cha siu still rox!
Now so far, we have good appetizers and passable ramen. Before I continue, I should mention that they have lots of free parking. Here’s where the place falls flat on its face. The service is bad. It’s the kind of service that you’d expect in a typical Chinese restaurant here. No, I’ll go further than that. It genuinely seemed like they were very disinterested in doing their jobs. There was no greeting from the waitstaff when we signed in and waited for our wall-facing counter seat. Service was incredibly slow despite the fact it was the dinner hour.
Come here if you’ve got the craving for ramen/izakaya food. Just don’t expect the experience and treatment that you’d usually get from one of these places. Order simply, eat and leave. Also interesting…there were no Japanese diners or staff inside…
Majikku Ramen
240 Skyline Plaza
Daly City CA 94015
650-756-2988
Heartbreak and laughter
Heartbreak that many ramen fans in the “bay area” know all too well…
You MUST MUST get to Santa Ramen before they open at 1730 to join the queue! Otherwise, you’ll never be able to taste the ultimate decadence of stewed pork and instead you’ll have to settle for the plain old decadence of tonkotsu cha-siu ramen instead.
It’s good stuff, but it’s not the good GOOD stuff…
There are noodles down there, lurking under the broth.
In the interest of “fair and balanced” ramen blogging, here’s an order of miso ramen
Santa DOES have a sense of humor, as evidenced by the sign below.
Guess too many people were asking stupid questions so they had to put up a sign. Bet they’re still fielding this stupid question, probably asked by stupid people that don’t read…
WAHAHAHAHAHAH
Santa’s moving to just south of the 92 on El Camino Real. That means easier parking and a Nijiya Market to buy stuff in after your large helping of steam ramen goodness! They’re not sure about when yet, but your roving correspondent visited the site and saw stockpots the size of small Tokyo apartments in the front, so they may be opening up before the end of the year…
So what’s so bad about a food court?
Maybe I should elaborate. Food Courts in American malls are generally bad. I mean, if a restaurant is in the local mall’s food court, chances are that the food is, ahem, pedestrian. Food meant for the masses and designed to appeal to people from Sioux City to Santa Clarita. And the less said about “ethnic” food chains that almost exclusively exist in food courts, the better. Think Panda Express or Sbarro’s or even Wolfgang Puck Express for a better idea of what I’m trying to get across here.
You can find good food in here (besides the groceries)
Food Courts in ethnic (read: not Safeway, Vons, Whole Foods or the like) grocery stores however, can be really good. Hell, even my beloved hawker centres in Singapore can be considered “food courts” minus the air-con. If you’ve got air-con, you then become an indoor food court.
Here in Costa Mesa, you have an udon place, a donburi place and a ramen place and a couple of other places tucked away inside this Mitsuwa Marketplace. Sometimes they are even part of a (gasp!) chain.
There’s good eats in this food court. Really.
Santouka Ramen in the food court
In Santouka’s case, they ARE part of a chain of ramen restaurants. From Tokyo. Does that still make them an evil chain? Probably not. Does their ramen deserve the hype? Well, that’s what I’m here to find out, 10 minutes away from John Wayne Airport (SNA), having a late lunch.
What to eat? How about that one on the left bottom corner?
According to ramenramenramen.net and rameniac, they’re part of a Tokyo based chain that is expanding in Southern California. Now I’m normally a Kyushu-men (Tonkotsu broth & stewed pork) kinda guy and this will be the first time I’ve had Ashikawa ramen (pork bone & seafood stock), which hails from Hokkaido. I ordered the #7, the shio ramen combo with the noodles and broth in a bowl and the pork and other condiments on the side (Sally would appreciate that), leaving the springy ramen noodles swimming in the surprisingly light shio broth with sesame seeds by itself. It was great! Although you can’t really tell the greatness by that simple statement because it’s not in ALL CAPS and in 60 point strong text, because that would be tacky. When you assemble your #7, drop the chasiu into the broth and then bury it under some noodles for a minute to warm it up. Then chew slowly, letting the buttery, meaty goodness coat your tongue before you let it slowly slide down your gullet. So there’s something good in THIS food court. Eat here!
The number seven comes with noodles & broth separate from the sides…
…so you can make your own bowl of shio ramen!
If this is what “chain restaurants” can be like, let’s have MORE Japanese food chains in supermarkets!! Santouka’s also in West LA too.
Santouka Ramen (inside the Mitsuwa Supermarket)
665 Paularino Avenue
Costa Mesa CA 92676
714-434-1101
Tourist Traps, Waikiki and ramen
My brief visit to Waikiki Beach (5 hours total) over 5 days in O’ahu demonstrates my aversion to known tourist traps. But first, some clarification…
There IS a difference between a tourist trap and a tourist attraction.
A tourist trap can be an attraction that has allowed the area surrounding it to get all whored out with businesses whose sole purpose is to relieve dumb tourists from their money, regardless of taste or cost, because they are there.
Examples: Waikiki Beach, Great Wall of China (Mutanyu Section), Fisherman’s Wharf (San Francisco), Times Square (NYC).
A tourist attraction is an place or item of interest where the “whoring out” that a tourist trap has is either non existent or unnecessary for the place or item of interest to exist as an attraction.
Examples: USS Arizona Memorial, USS Missouri, Diamond Head, North Shore.
I don’t think you can accuse the above Hawaiian attractions of being “whored out” or “tourist traps”.
Sometimes there are reasons to brave tourist traps. In some cases, it’s the only way to visit an ancient wonder (Great Wall) and in other cases, it’s the businesses that are part of the tourist trap area. In San Francisco, the only reason to go down there (if you live here) is that the Wharf has The City’s only (ONLY) In & Out Burger and Hooters as well as the old school seafood restaurants. In Waikiki Beach, there’s a firing range (yep) and several good ramen shops. And like the idiot that I am, I went to Waikiki Beach to eat ramen…
The first shop I hit was on my second night in O’ahu. Ezogiku Ramen is a chain of ramen shops that are scattered all over O’ahu along with the original shops in Tokyo and Sapporo.
Yes, I got the addresses to the shops in Japan and they’re on my “to eat” list now.
After reading about the history of Ezogiku and its Japanese roots, I asked the waitress (who was bringing me a beer, yeay!) what the specialty of the house was.
Waitress: “Miso Ramen”
Me: “One please!”
The miso had that “zing” that we all love in our miso ramen. Or maybe that was a touch too much MSG. But in either case, it was very well done. The noodles were snappy and the scallions were good too. The slice of cha siu was cold, like it was taken out of an icebox and put onto the bowl and the broth could have been a bit warmer.
Many of the customers inside the shop were Japanese and if I closed my eyes while slurping down the noodles in my bowl, I could imagine I was in Tokyo in some unknown ramen shop. Bliss. Until a squad of PRC tourists came in, excessively loud (in both dress AND volume) and hungry. Then when they all got their food, the slurping began. A great sound! Guess they love ramen too.
Ramen Ezogiku Waikiki
2146 Kalakaua Avenue
Waikiki HI 96815
808-926-8616
Warning: There ARE differences between shops that share the same name. There’s an Ezogiku Ramen on University Avenue down the hill from UH. Other than sharing the name, the ramen here was mediocre. I won’t go on further because it was a big disappointment as this was to be my last meal before I caught the red-eye back to the mainland. A word of advice: If you go to a ramen shop and you see the bowls coming out of the kitchen with heaps of bean sprouts on top, think carefully before you order. Too much bean sprouts on bowls of ramen is like maki (sushi rolls) that’s all rice and not enough fish. It’s FILLER!
Run away!!
Rai Rai Ramen
You know, it just wouldn’t be me if I flew somewhere really far and DIDN’T find a good ramen shop, just by chance.
Well, I did. This is my first full day here on O’ahu and I decided to break in my rental Roadster by doing a drive up the windward side of the island. Naturally, around 12ish, I was feeling peckish (had a small brekkie; part of the “diet”) and I saw this shop in the distance. It called to me, “tabemasu“..so I did.
Parking right in front, lah!
They’re apparently a well known and well regarded shop. I walked in and immediately ordered a bowl of Hakata Ramen.
mmm, could a return visit to Kyushu be in my future?
The noodles were springy and the condiments were generous. The cha-siu slice was tender and the broth was flavorful, if just a touch salty. Wonderful stuff! If you’re on the Windward side of O’ahu, EAT!
Sapporo Rai Rai Ramen
124 Oneawa Street
Kailua HI 96374
1-808-230-8208
Himawari Ramen
San Mateo (just south of SFO on da 101) is the Bay Area’s epicentre of ramen. Most, if not all of the shops with “good ramen” are all here.
The old standard bearer is Santa Ramen. And with visiting Santa, the old rules still apply. “Leave San Francisco at 1600 for dinner of stewed pork ramen at 1800.”
Sometimes that’s impractical, even for good ramen (unless you are in Shinjuku waiting at Men-ya Musashi). We (me and my flatmate and his fren) got to Santa at 1845 and saw the 60 minute long queue. We (collectively) said “screw it” and drove back to downtown San Mateo and Himawari Ramen on 2nd Avenue.
Himawari is a newer player on the ramen block and both Santa and Himawari have their detractors and defenders. They are a younger group of people running the restaurant and it shows in the decor and menu choices. Santa is in an old store of some sort and the menu has the basic ramen dishes, appetizers and beer, Himawari has a modern Japanese design and has shochu cocktails in addition to a long sake list and different appetizers. Think Shitamachi versus Daikanyama and you’ll get the idea.
I had a Calpico-hi, a thirst quenching beverage made from Calpico and shochu. Yum. Hic. This got me thinking. I have shochu at home. I also have Pocari Sweat. Put the two together….!
WAHAHAHAH! Ahem…time for appetiser.
It’s pork that’s fried. I forgot the name and those aren’t my hashi in the pic!
The meal of the evening all around was tonkotsu ramen (AKA Kyushu-men).
It’s art, I tell ya! ART!
Himawari uses thinner ramen than Santa so the ramen has a satisfying “snap” when you bite into them. The broth isn’t quite as rich as Santa’s but is still flavorful. It could have been a bit hotter when it got to the table, but there were three orders and I was busy taking pictures…
All in all, a worthy competitior to Santa and now I’ve got two places I can go to for my ramen fix!
Himawari
202 2nd Avenue
San Mateo CA 94401
650-375-1005
Oyaji
An izukaya opened up in my ‘hood a few months back called Oyaji.
Well, not really “in my hood” as it’s about a mile as the crow flies. Maybe in the other side of my ‘hood. A 2 minute drive or a 20 minute stroll in the howling wind and cold that marks a San Francisco summer out here.
The best way to describe an izukaya is a bar that serves beer and nihonshu and food that goes good with both. So there’s all kinds of stuff, from ramen to a full sushi bar to yakitori and the like. Menu here.
Schu called and wanted to eat. I suggested Oyaji. We went. I ordered a starter of California Maki and Cha-Siu Ramen. The sushi here is fresh made and the rolls were pretty good. Purty too.
Tastes as good as it looks
They have an excellent selection of sake and shochu. Not so much on the beer. Although they did have the dark Asahi I drank a lot of last time I was in Tokyo. Burp.
Necessities of modern life lor.
The ramen arrived and the broth was flavorful, but not too heavy or too full of MSG. The noodles were of the thick kind and were not overcooked. Springy.
Imagine, a nice bowl o’ ramen close by my house! Waaaah!
Not overcooked, they’re springy!
Some minuses though. The egg was unusually salty (maybe stored in soy sauce?) and the bowl didn’t come out as hot as it should have. Nitpicking here though, because…
the cha-siu was tender and there was just enough fat to give it good taste without being gross with the fat on top. Mmmmmm.
It’s best to walk here from the house though. Then can walk back, thus burning off all calories!
Oyaji
3123 Clement St.
SF CA 94121
Katana-Ya is (sorta) Back!!!
A few years ago, near UCSF, there was a kick-ass ramen shop called Katana-Ya. They made lots of ramen and had some other kinds of food (non ramen).
Now, a new Katana-Ya has opened up in Downtown San Francisco on Geary, near Mason.
The new Katana-Ya on Geary Street
This is the banner you look for. It says “ra-men”
The restaurant is dominated by the sushi bar…
This new incarnation of Katana-Ya is a sushi bar/restaurant that happens to serve ramen, instead of the other way around, like the old place. I ordered miso cha-siu ramen and hoped for the best.
Mi-so ra-men. Will it be “yum?”
The broth was flavorful, the cha-siu had a bit of fat on it and was tender (but not as fall-apart as Santa Ramen’s stewed pork) and the noodles were the thick kind, nice and hearty! And as an added bonus, it’s actually run by Japanese AND a couple of the people running the place worked at the old place!
In short, I like!
Katana-Ya
430 Geary Boulevard (at Mason)
SF CA
Open for dinner, 1700-0200 every night!
This is a LOT closer than Santa Ramen…
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