Rahmen Academy/MusashiurawaRahmen Academy/武蔵浦和

     

The Saitama-ken Musashiurawa Rahmen Academy is open from 11 to midnight every day of the week except Sunday, when they are only open until 10 PM. Some shops may be open shorter or longer times than that. It's located right near JR Musashiurawa Station and it is another one of these ramen theme parks that you see dotted all around Tokyo, typically in shopping malls near stations. This place has 5 or 6 shops, all seemingly good, but none of them appeared to be particularly well-known or outstanding. There was one Yokohama-style place, one Hokkaido, one Hakata, one Chinese place and one of unknown lineage. I ate at the Hokkaido-style one, called Marutake, which appears to be affiliated with the Mutsumiya chain. I had the current special, the sesame miso ramen with cabbage and pork - this was a very strongly-sesame-flavored dish, with plenty of cabbage but a bit skimpy on the pork, which they browned with one of those gas torches immediately before bringing it over. The noodles appeared to be hand-made but not sure, they were thin and not curly. Good dish but the flavor was very strong. This place is actually huge, a long, long counter with a deep kitchen behind it, obviously built to handle a lot of customers. But not too many people in the place on a Sunday PM, I sure hope for their sake that they get a lot of people during the week. You can see some of the other specialty dishes from some of the other stores in the picture above. One other interesting thing on the menu at Marutake was the yaki-shorompo - haven't seen the yaki version of those before, those I did not try. However if you are in the mood for Chinese food the Chinese place Wang Rong right next door looks like a better bet actually. Good but not worth a special trip to Saitama.

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