MenYa Zeroshiki/Itabashi麺屋零式/板橋

 

This ramen shop is about a 10 minute walk from Shin-Itabashi station on the Toei Mita line. There was about a 20-25 minute wait, inside the store, no chairs, and this was on a Sunday. The store is 10-11 seats and was almost completely full of teenage boys in blue blazers, probably returning from Sunday cram school. The "zero" kanji in "Zeroshiki" actually means zero (0), and shiki means "ceremony". Not sure what the two of them together means, my dictionaries didn't have a compound like this. I will have to ask at work to see if anyone knows there. The man behind the counter is a very intense younger guy working alone and really hustling. Very firmly asking customers to wait and filing their orders carefully on the wall above him. Some good pictures of the regular tsukemen are here. You can see the thick noodles similar to Tetsu's noodles, for example. I actually had the zeroshiki tsukesoba (零式 つけそば) which was a tsukemen-type dish, with larger amounts of veggies but not a lot of pork, with close to a Jiro taste. This is limited to only a set number of bowls per day, and it took about 10 minutes to prepare due to the very thick noodles. It included two boiled quail eggs, and one of those really long strange pointy mushrooms (6" long) so be sure to specify if you don't want those. The noodles were fairly thick and rectangular cut, I recommend getting them katame in this case.

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