by Holly Hughes
But the last decade has seen ramen’s street cred rise in cities such as New York, Los Angeles and Seattle. It’s a mystery why Chicago isn’t a ramen hotbed.
Two theories as to Chicago’s underwhelming ramen representation: Among Asians in Illinois, there are more Indians, Chinese, Koreans and Filipinos than Japanese. A bigger reason is that ramen is a laborious, time-consuming dish that, to prepare well, a restaurant has to pretty much make the dish its singular focus.
There’s this terrible movie called “The Ramen Girl,” in which Brittany Murphy’s character apprentices at a Tokyo ramen shop. There was one memorable line from the ramen chef, though: “A bowl of ramen is a self-contained universe with life from the sea, the mountain and the earth, all existing in perfect harmony. What holds it all together is the broth. The broth gives life to the ramen.”
As great broths go, three in our area are worth noting.
Takashi Yagihashi’s cooking can be described as white-tablecloth Japanese through a French prism, but the Sunday brunch menu at his Bucktown restaurant, Takashi, is closest to his native roots. It’s the one day of the week he serves ramen.
For Takashi, growing up in Mito, a town outside Tokyo known for its abundant pink plum blossoms, ramen was omnipresent.
“My house was on the same block as a ramen shop. We’d get so hungry after baseball practice we’d go there for a snack, then I’d eat dinner again,” Takashi said. “I wanted to introduce what you can eat in Japan if you traveled there.”
The number of regional ramen styles in Japan number in the dozens, but the most prevalent is Tokyo-style shoyu, the Japanese word for soy sauce. Like a Chicago hot dog, you’ll always find the same six ingredients atop a shoyu ramen: bamboo shoots, scallions, seaweed, hard-boiled egg sliced lengthwise, braised pork and Naruto-style fish cake (characterized by its pink swirl design).
The day I visited, it so happened that Rick Bayless and his wife, Deann, were also dining at Takashi, sharing a bowl of the shoyu ramen ($13). I could hear him from a few tables away raving about the noodles. We compared notes after the meal.
“There’s something so elementally true about getting and understanding what role broth plays and how incredibly satisfying that is,” Bayless said. “I like the very gentle spicing in it, that hint of star anise. It’s gentle, doesn’t hit you over the head. That to me is the perfect Sunday morning: that Tokyo ramen.”
Takashi’s name is attached to the noodle bar on the seventh-floor food court inside Macy’s Loop store. The ramen at his Bucktown restaurant, though, is miles better, because he’s overseeing the broth’s 24-hour cooking process.
Chicken and pork bones are boiled for hours. Bonito flakes (classic Japanese flavoring agent of dried shaved tuna), kombu (kelp) and dried sardines are added, giving the stock that savory taste sensation of umami. From there, the stock base goes in any number of directions—the popular shoyu, or the version I ordered, miso ramen. (True miso is a thick paste made from fermented soybeans, not the gunky powder turned soup.)
The miso ramen ($13) arrived studded with sweet corn, bean sprouts and wakame, sweet strips of seaweed.
I slurped louder than culturally appropriate. This is, in fact, acceptable behavior. Slurping accomplishes two duties: It cools the noodle, and the extra intake of oxygen supposedly amplifies flavor, the same way it would with wine.
A sure sign of unadulterated slurping was the dots of broth that soon splattered on the table and my shirt. The broth had a nutty, earthy flavor that soothed on that chilly day (miso ramen is indigenous to Hokkaido, Japan’s northernmost island, known for its long, frigid winters). Therein lies the difference between 10-cent instant ramen and Takashi’s broth: One is just salty, the other a deep, resonant flavor made possible by a secret ingredient called Father Time.
Bill Kim’s most excellent Urban Belly offers a lighter take on ramen ($13). Authenticity is not a concern for Kim, a Korean-American who can deftly meld far-off Asian flavors. His dashi-based pork broth (bonito flakes and kombu) features Vietnamese pho spices, lime juice and fish sauce. Kim’s ramen tilts more refreshing, though the richness from the pork belly tips it back the other way.
Kim tipped his hand: “We all go to Santouka. A good Asian will know to go to Santouka in Mitsuwa.”
Santouka is the chain ramen franchise from Japan, inside the food court at Arlington Heights’ Mitsuwa Marketplace. Its special toroniku shio ramen was so spectacular I asked the Santouka manager its secrets. I was hit with a big, fat “no, thanks.”
The manager is a young Japanese fellow who allegedly speaks no English. Even with the lure of positive press, the manager’s English-speaking subordinates claimed that he was under no authority to divulge proprietary company secrets and, therefore, get off my lawn!
This much I could derive: Their special toroniku shio ramen ($8.99) has buttery, luscious slices of pork cheeks that fell apart with no teeth resistance. The broth is wintry white, as if the noodles were soaked in buttermilk, then flecked with sesame seeds. It’s reminiscent of tonkotsu ramen, the Southern Japan-style broth made by boiling pork bones for a long time (not to be confused with tonkatsu, the panko-breaded fried pork cutlets).
Don’t let anyone tell you otherwise: In the ramen world, tonkotsu is king among kings.
The top of the broth glistened; an emulsified pork fat spillage that would put Greenpeace volunteers on high alert. The toppings came separately on a side plate—wood-ear mushrooms, scallions, bamboo shoots, fish cake and the fatty pork—to be dumped into the ramen by the diner.
It was profoundly delicious. The broth’s porkiness was so rich and intense I inhaled every last sip. The toothsome noodles were made using alkaline salt, which gives them an eggy-yellow hue. Beneath the savoriness, there’s a gentle sweetness to it all. In all my visits to Santouka, it accessed the same lobe and cortex that flooded back memories of ramen carts outside Tokyo train stations.
After I slurped the last of the noodles, a residue of slick, porky balm had formed around my lips. That was my favorite part.
WORLD’S BEST SOMMELIER VS. WORLD’S WORST CUSTOMER
By Frank Bruni From Food & Wine
Former New York Times dining critic Frank Bruni—author of the memoir Born Round: Secret History of a Full-Time Eater—knows a thing or two about restaurant impersonations. Here he deliberately sets out to test the mettle of a top Manhattan wine steward.
I vetoed the Champagne that Le Bernardin’s Aldo Sohm suggested at the meal’s start, telling him my mood wasn’t so bubbly. Rejecting his advice again, I insisted on having a red instead of a white for the charred octopus, then I staged a tabletop tantrum over the price of the Montrachet that he initially paired with the monkfish.
As dinner progressed and Sohm’s face turned an increasingly flustered shade of red, I accepted only one of his recommendations, a sake for a smoked-salmon carpaccio bejeweled with glittering salmon caviar. Otherwise, I grimaced and protested while he stammered and perspired. I wanted to see how well the “world’s best sommelier” could roll with the punches—and just how many of them he could take.
That’s what had brought me and a companion to Le Bernardin, one of Manhattan’s most esteemed restaurants for more than two decades. We were staging a sort of contest, which pitted a pesky, deliberately obnoxious naysayer (i.e., me) against a wine savant of world renown. The restaurant’s venerated chef, Eric Ripert, and a few of his lieutenants knew about our ploy. But they hadn’t informed Sohm, whose reactions to me would ideally reveal something about the flexibility of wine pairings and the deliberations of a master sommelier.
Sohm, 38, is certainly a master. Born, raised and educated in Austria, he moved to New York in 2004 to work with Kurt Gutenbrunner at Wallsé and the chef’s other restaurants, then left to take charge of the wine program at Le Bernardin in 2007. While working full-time there, he boned up for sommelier competitions and bested rivals from around the globe in Rome in 2008, winning top honors from the Worldwide Sommelier Association. He
was judged on his ability to recognize wines in blind tastings, to edit a wine list and to suggest pairings for food.
It was the last of these talents that I focused on, assessing the agility and inspiration with which he navigated Le Bernardin’s list of about 750 wines from 14 countries. The wine list emphasizes France, but I wasn’t going to let Sohm do that. Nor was I going to let him return too frequently to his homeland, which he’s been known to do.
“We’re yanking you out of the Alps, Aldo,” I made clear at the start, when he tried to substitute an Austrian Muskateller for the spurned glasses of Champagne. So he toggled to the island of Santorini and a 2008 Thalassitis from Gai’a Wines. He likened the body, bite and citrus notes of the Greek white to a French Chablis. But why was it the right wine for our canapé of raw tuna pressed in briny kombu seaweed?
“Acidity and minerality,” he said, explaining that the wine should brighten and sharpen the taste of the fish the way a splash of lemon and a scattering of coarse salt would.
Bit by bit, Sohm detailed his philosophy on wine-food pairings, saying that not only should the wine burnish the food, but also the food should burnish the wine.
“Food and wine are in a marriage where both should get better,” he said. “It’s a two-way relationship.”
“But shouldn’t it be a three-way?” I asked. He blushed. I explained: “Shouldn’t you consider the drinker, too, and what his or her taste in wine is?”
“That’s true,” Sohm conceded, then added that he was only now learning what kind of wine drinker I was.
I accelerated his education, telling him I’d long been prejudiced in favor of drier wines. That inclination, not just orneriness, was why the Greek white had worked better for me than the Austrian.
It was also one reason I waved away the floral Tramin Gewürztraminer from the Alto Adige region of Italy—the Alps, mind you—that he paired with the exquisite octopus, a Mediterranean-meets-Asian dish combining Bartlett pear with fermented black beans and a squid ink-and-miso vinaigrette. I told him to give me something drier and demanded a red to boot. So he presented two California Zinfandels, which he said would be fruity enough to match the dish. But the first one—a 2006 late-harvest wine from Dashe Cellars—had definite sweetness. The second, a 2005 from Martinelli’s Jackass Vineyard, didn’t, though there was a price for that.
“Seventeen percent alcohol,” Sohm noted, thus commencing a tutorial on another crucial aspect of wine pairings during a meal that includes a half dozen courses or more: pacing. The wines, in sequence and aggregate, shouldn’t exhaust a diner’s palate or leave him too tipsy.
Without being asked to, Sohm chose as many wines for under $100 a bottle as wines that hit or exceeded that mark, even though roughly 80 percent of Le Bernardin’s list falls in the higher-priced category.
But for another stunner of a dish, supple pan-roasted monkfish in a gingery sake broth studded with honshimeji mushrooms, Sohm got a little bit ritzy: He wanted to pour glasses of a premier cru 2006 Chassagne-Montrachet from Domaine Bernard Moreau Les Chevenottes. It was white Burgundy at its most regal, and it cost $150 a bottle.
“Too much!” I declared, trying for the vocal equivalent of a pout.
So he trotted out another white Burgundy, because he said the sake in the dish called for a wine with soft tannins. This one, a 2005 Philippe Colin Maranges, was $75, and, though it paired beautifully with the fish—making the broth’s flavor seem deeper and earthier—it had less elegance than its regional kin. Sohm studied me as I registered the difference.
“When you’ve driven a Ferrari and you go back to a Mercedes, you can feel a little lost,” he consoled me. “That doesn’t mean the Mercedes isn’t any good.” The Maranges was in fact excellent, and its crispness made it in some ways a better match for the monkfish than the Montrachet. We also preferred it to a California Pinot Noir that he threw into the mix at the last minute.
I noticed that the redness in Sohm’s face had faded somewhat, and that he now seemed much too calm. So I became even more strident and implacable for Ripert’s final savory course, an upscale surf and turf of grilled escolar and Kobe beef with pungent anchovy-butter sauce.
“No Bordeaux!” I said, dismissing his pick. “No red wine, period.
“And no white, either,” I pronounced, my voice turning sinister. “In fact, no wine. I want a pairing of hard liquor. It can be in a cocktail. It can be served neat. Your choice.”
Sohm looked baffled. Nervous. Then he vanished.
When he reappeared—too soon, and with a stride too brisk and steady—he had in his clutch a bottle of Zacapa rum from Guatemala, aged up to 23 years. He said it just might work with the Kobe and escolar, and sure enough it did, providing precisely the sweet-with-unctuous charge that distinguishes a classic union of Sauternes and foie gras. And because the rum had been aged so long, it was gorgeously smooth.
By that point, Sohm had taken us to eight countries, presented us with about a dozen grape varietals and, most impressive, maintained extraordinary grace under pestering. What could be left?
As it turned out, beer. In part because of its carbonation, which can cut richness and settle a full stomach, Sohm sometimes likes to throw it in toward the end of a long meal, and on this night he offered a Westmalle Dubbel Trappist beer from Belgium for a milk-chocolate pot de crème topped with maple-syrup caramel. The dessert neatly underscored the vaguely chocolaty aspect of many dark brews. Sampling the food and the beer together, I was put in mind of a chocolate egg cream.
Visions of a Jewish deli staple at a haute French restaurant? The evening’s last laugh belonged to Sohm, who bid us good night with beads of perspiration on his forehead but a triumphant gleam in his eyes.
NIGHTS ON THE TOWN
By Patric Kuh From Saveur
Author of The Last Days of Haute Cuisine, chef / writer Kuh—otherwise known as the dining critic for Los Angeles magazine—here opens a nostalgic window on the glamour days of L.A.’s restaurant scene.
I love dusk in LA, that moment just before restaurants open for dinner. A waiter runs to work, toting his white shirt on a hanger. A kitchen crew wolfs down a quick meal at the empty bar. A parking valet rolls out the pavement stand. The scent of night—blooming jasmine is in the air, and all over the city, against an evening sky whose colors are unique to this part of Southern California, the lights are coming up. They click on in the recessed nooks of a sleek sushi joint. They sparkle on a chandelier in an old-school French restaurant somewhere in the San Fernando Valley. They shine from sconces in a west side bistro. And, everywhere, there’s the neon: “Cocktails,” “Steaks and Chops,” “Seafood.” Night falls, and, feeling the first pangs of hunger, you are faced with that most pleasant of quandaries in LA: Where should we eat?
As a restaurant critic, I spend hours each day driving around this city, asking myself that very question, the same one Angelenos have asked themselves since the earliest days of fine dining in LA. And I spend just as much time sitting in crowded restaurants, considering the service, the food, the setting, and wondering what makes restaurant culture here so different from that of any other city in the world. It’s no secret that LA’s upscale restaurants tend to be more casual and more outwardly trendy than those you find in other great food cities, or that the cuisine here is often lighter and more far ranging. But, why? What made it so?
It’s okay not to have too much of a history in Los Angeles. In fact, being without one is something of a tradition. The past here need reach no further back than the moment the lead character (in drop-dead heels, please) steps off the 20th Century Limited at Union Station and onto the palm-lined street. Over the course of the past hundred years or so, when it came to restaurants in LA, things could quickly get funny. Nothing was native here, so borrowed themes took on their own, distinctive character.
Consider L’Orangerie, the venerable and now defunct French restaurant on La Cienega Boulevard. Until it closed, a few years ago, you could treat yourself to a fine mea
l there, shielded from traffic by boxed hedgerows, and find that the evocation of the court of Versailles was in no way hampered by the working oil wells down the street. And still today, in the Atwater Village neighborhood, one can have a good prime rib at the Tam O’Shanter, an institution that dates from 1922 and has an interior modeled after a Scottish peasant hut: sagging roof, bulging walls, soot-darkened mantel. The original designer, Harry Oliver, didn’t have any actual link to the Scottish Highlands; he’d perfected the look on Culver City movie lots.
Some call that superficiality; I call it lightness, the defining characteristic of LA dining. The knock against us as a city is that we’re not real epicures, that we are health-obsessed weenies who care only if there’s a star in the vicinity and will hardly eat because we must be doing squat thrusts at dawn up a canyon. The truth is that we are engaged by food but pair that passion with a sense of fun. It’s not fakeness that bothers us but fakeness without heart.
True, like every other place in America, we once had our potted-palm dining rooms where classical French food might be enjoyed, but one can only wonder whether the Angelenos who ate at those places took all that saucy food at face value or whether they thought it was just a bit of show business. With the rise of the motion picture industry in the 1920s, fantasy became part of the landscape of everyday life in LA, and the theme restaurant took root. At the Jail, a restaurant that opened in 1925 in Silver Lake, the waiters dressed as inmates. At Ye Bull Pen Inn, which opened in 1920 downtown, customers dined in rows of livestock stalls. No matter what the theme, most places served comfort-food classics, like fried chicken and steak. But at Don the Beachcomber, which opened in 1934 and kicked off a nationwide tiki trend, the Polynesian menu matched the setting.
