After number of drinks tonight, I needed some food. More specifically, I wanted some salty ramen broth. Fortunately, there were quite a few ramen shops nearby, one of which happened to be an outlet of Ichiran. My immediate instinct was to run and try one of the other ones instead, especially given the absolutely horrible experience that I had at one of Ichiran's outlets in Hong Kong a few months ago. But a recent comment suggested that the TST branch was inconsistent with what one gets in Japan. So I figured that I might as well see what the real deal is, especially since I could finally try one of those cool isolation booths here.
I got their standard bowl. And in an effort to ditch all of those annoying coins in my pocket, I opted for all sorts of extras on the side, like onions, seaweed, garlic and even some kind of vinegar of theirs called "osukaran." Fortunately, the bowl was indeed much better than the one in Hong Kong. The red sauce was still a bit sweet, but was also a lot spicier when I went one notch up, helping me to wolf this bowl down pretty quickly. OK, I may very well be going back to Ichiran again one day...just as long as it's not in Hong Kong.
1 comment:
I find the vinegar makes all the difference. brings the needed tang to the umami. I actually don't mind the hk one, having had it many times in both hk and japan. a tad inferior but not that far off. maybe it was an off day in hk for you.
Prefer this to ippudo which to me is just 'heavy' without the corresponding umami.
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