Food: Santoka Ramen

$9 for a bowl of ramen?  For years, I always associated ramen with those uber-cheap, freeze-dried noodle packets that I survived on in college for literally pennies a meal.  Even my family in Hong Kong would eat packaged ramen, or "cartoon noodles" as they called it, for a quick snack.  They came in a variety of flavors with mysterious powdered soup bases to add.  I even knew someone in grad school who added extra salt to her ramen as well as someone who spiced up their ramen with canned tuna.  I can barely eat the stuff now.

However, that was before I discovered real authentic ramen.  Not the Cup of Noodles but actual ramen.  One of our friends in our postdoc lab was from Japan and introduced us to a few ramen restaurants in California and now we can't get enough---fresh, never-frozen ramen noodles in a thick bowl of soup with tender slices of meat?  It's an entire meal to itself.

Last night, we went to the local Mitsuwa Marketplace in Edgewater.  It's basically a Japanese grocery store that sells high quality, relatively expensive Japanese goods, but the real draw is in the food court that contains many different Japanese restaurants.  You can get assorted rice plates, gyoza, a variety of tempura, exotic cakes and dessert, but the star of the show is definitely Santoka Ramen, which specializes in authentic, Japanese ramen.  They offer the ramen in three flavored broths:  shio (salt), shoyu (soy sauce), and miso, in order of thickness.  We typically go for the miso ramen (you might as well go all out).  It starts as a thick broth from a base of slow cooked pork bone (tonkotsu) that is almost milky or creamy in texture.  That sounds a little weird, but there's almost no equivalent in American food---it's almost like melted butter with a rich, salty pork flavoring.  It's a robust, complex, hearty soup that supports the firm ramen noodles---these aren't your typical fried and freeze-dried ramen noodles.  They then top the bowl with tender slices of chasu (fatty pork) that melt in your mouth as well as a smattering of other toppings.  The end result is a big bowl of hot noodles with a flavor that I've never encountered before and I discover again each time I taste it.  It's like taking a sip of a fine wine compared to the boxed wine you drank in college.

Is it worth $9 a bowl?  Absolutely.  It's worth driving over an hour through traffic to get there.  The other nice thing about the Edgewater location is that the food court has floor to ceiling windows with an amazing view over the Hudson onto downtown Manhattan.  What better place to slurp your noodles?