Booth Ramen

I finally found it.  The booth ramen place in Shibuya that I had once heard about from a guy who I met at the Jeju frisbee tournament.  So what’s so special about this place that requires it’s own blog post?  Well, it’s an experience.  You’re eating ramen in a booth.  The place is called Ichiran, 一蘭. 

First you buy your food ticket from the vending machine in the front.  There’s only 1 type of ramen sold at the store.  However there’s extra noodles on the side and the soft boiled egg (a must try!).  This place only seats 12 people, in 12 booths, and thus, the timing of your arrival is a critical factor, or else you’ll be standing in line.  After you buy your ticket, there’s a small questionnaire (english available) so you can configure (engineering word here..) your ramen to the your exact specifications for consumption.  There’s words like “strong broth flavor”, garlic quantity in fractions of cloves.  Then there was the spicy pepper multiplier: none, 0.5x multiplier (倍, pronounced ‘bai’), 1x multiplier, and the ultra strong 2x multiplier.  I kept with the normal route for everything.  My spicy 倍 was 0.5x which was the recommended dose for first timers.

Once I sat down, I passed the questionnaire and my prepaid food tickets (ramen and egg) to to the cook behind the curtain.  He, in turn, and quickly left to fill my order and came back within 1 min with my egg.  As with my prior post about japanese instructional signs, there was an instructional guide to crack an egg.  Well, I’m usually quite good with cracking an egg, but I got a little nervous with the documentation, so I almost screwed up.  

 The egg comes with 2 packets of salt, a bowl for your shell scraps, and a napkin.

Pretty soon, before I had even finished peeling the egg, the food came.  Then, the curtain in front of me was fully closed.  I had been served.

That red pepper was pretty spicy.  I can see why they only recommend the 0.5x multiplier.  As for the ramen, it looked amazing.  This place makes their own noodles (自家製生麺).  And, yes, there was a nice layer of fat on the top.  Sadly, no bits of fat, but no biggie, I wanted to eat healthier today anyways.  The chashu (japanese spelling) pork was nice and tender.  

Apologies for the picture, my 8MP camera phone has white balance issues with the lighting.  The 28mm lens was barely able to capture the tight booth.  Anyways, back to eating…  I busted out my egg, took a bite and threw it into the ramen.  It was a darn good soft boiled egg to match the ramen.  It was actually better than the eggs that they serve at our local ramen place.  Kinda weird to say that huh?  Anyways, I digress.  See pic…

Ok, so it was a fantastic meal.  I can’t wait to try the 1x multiplier spicy bowl, or the 2x spicy.  There’s also something that I hadn’t mentioned.   This place claims to have the only noodle refill service.  You have to pre-pay for the extra noodles, but for 160 yen, you can get another set of noodles to be added into your soup.  There’s a few signs reminding you to not finish all your soup.  Then you can press a button to get the mysterious waiter/waitress to hand you another bowl of noodles. 

Anyways, it was a great experience.  The ramen was great.  I loved the spiciness, negi, fresh noodles, and egg.  The pork was pretty good, but I still like the braised style pork that some other ramen places specialize in.  However, I can’t complain.  It was pretty darn good.  The place is open 24 hours, so I’m pretty sure that I’ll be stopping by next week to introduce Diana to the “booth ramen” experience.