Tokyo  ramen  in English  24 by 7
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Good strong shoyu, almost like Takeoka Ramen. Large amount of meat (150g) and menmas, lots of ginger too. This is a left-over review from the winter - note all of us standing out there freezing. Video-type ticket machine in the corner. Popular with women. Opened in January. The Keisuke chain is a set of different shops that are mostly numbered (nidaime, yondaime), although this is an exception.
Shop Home Page
Google Maps
It's good to see shops with female employees in a predominantly male-dominated field of employment. It's even better to see them with women owners. Menya Akatsuki in Komagome opened in December of 2009 and it has a single woman as the owner and employee. It's a bit out of the way at the top of the loop but worth it, it's in the first floor of an apartment/office-like building. They make a very Jiro-like bowl, including both ramen and abura-soba versions. Very simple menu. They claim that their extra-thick noodles (and they are very thick actually) are house-made with kansui (Google it) from Inner Mongolia. The pork was very good as were the noodles. The soup was very clear with very little suspended fat. No line but very crowded. Self service water. Standard Jiro-like set of toppings.
LiveDoor Page
Saito Blog
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Funabashi Ramen Yokocho. Not really anything worth traveling for, there's an Aobai but not much else to stir the soul. All the way in the back past the meat counter of some department store.
Gurunavi Page
Google Maps
Hinode Ramen is a very casual shop in a slightly sketchy area of Yokohama, on Hirato-Sakuragi Dori, right next to an off-track betting office and right after several other ramen shops on the other side (going south-west on the dori). Lots of crusty old men in track suits and slightly creepy looking younger guys milling around with racing newspapers folded up under their arms. Hinode Ramen makes great press of their different tonkotsu gyoukai tsukemen types and their thick noodles. Their most popular dish "gou-tsukemen" or "剛つけ麺" (剛 = "gou" = strong, masculine) will run you a mere 750 yen, before adding any of the toppings. However I decided to go for their special dish, the "剛満つけ麺" or "gou-man-tsukemen", for 900 yen. This is a special tsukemen that they claim scores 30 on the Brix scale (they transliterate it as ブリックス). I found it to be so thick, with little clumps of stuff, that it was like pudding. Offically the Brix Scale is a standard way of measuring and describing the sugar content of a given liquid, such as measuring the amount of sugar in grape juice so you know what kind of wine it will produce. But this shop seems to have co-opted the term to mean something more like specific gravity, which is a sort of related concept but not exactly the same. This guy must have gotten a Brix measuring device or a refractometer and started measuring the density of his tsukemen broth. Isn't that clever. The fattening/thickening agent is presumably some combination of lard and rice/wheat flour, or something similar to cornstarch. The place also claims to have super-thick noodles (kiwami) but they weren't thicker or significantly thicker than any other super-thick noodle tsukemen place I have been to, in fact I have been to a couple that have been thicker.
Note though that the Brix 30 (ブリックス30) gou-man-tsukemen is only available from 5 PM onwards, and there are only a limited number each day.
Shop Home Page
Video showing how ridiculously thick it is
Google Maps
Throughout Japan there are a number of what I will call "ramen shop theme parks". These theme parks are not outdoor affairs with clowns, balloons and roller coasters but rather they are simply collections of individual shops inside shopping centers and malls, etc. and the theme, surprisingly enough, is ramen. The most famous one is probably the Shin-Yokohama Ramen Museum, actually that one is more like a real museum than a theme park, however it's a commercial enterprise like all the rest to be sure.
I have been to just about all of of the ramen theme parks in and near Tokyo and I will present links to the reviews or external sites here:
VISITED
Shin-Yokohama Ramen Museum (Yokohama)
Ramen Square NY (Tachikawa City)
Ramen Kokugikan (Odaiba)
Ramen Symphony (Kawasaki City)
Shinatatsu (Shinagawa) (a branch of the excellent Tetsu is here)
Sagamihara Liberty Gourmet Plaza
Tokyo Station Ramen Street
Ramen Academy (Saitama City)
Ramen Tokoro (in Ebina Vinawalk)
Ramen Theater (Chiba Inage-ku)
Koenji Ramen Yokocho (TETSU is here also)
Funabashi Ramen Yokocho
NOT YET VISITED
Koenji Ramen Yokocho is another group of ramen shops located sort of inside/next to JR Koenji Station. It opened in Dec of 2009. There are branches of 4 stores here, three of which are famous already: TETSU, Moukou Tanmen, Kunigami-ya, and one that is less well known, the local Daikian, an offshoot of Daiki in Yushima. Did not eat at any of these places, since have been to all of them already at other location. I will say that the basement location felt very cramped though.
Other Blog Page
Google Maps
Didn't eat here but this is another Ramen Theme Park in the Tokyo (Chiba) area, one of the last ones that I haven't been to already. Ramen Gekijou (劇場) = Ramen Theater. Several shops, but none that I had really heard of. One interesting thing about this place is that they seem to rotate the shops more frequently than other ramen theme parks. An additional listing of the current and past shops is here. However because this place is so out of the way, perhaps they get only second-tier shops or shops that are moderately famous in other parts of Japan, but not the Tokyo/Chiba headliners. Too far to walk from JR Inage Station (JR Sobu Line), you have to take a bus (from bus stop #1 on the east side of the station). Semi-outlet-type stores for cheap Chinese sneakers etc. also available for your shopping pleasure in the same building.
One's Mall Home Page
Google Maps
I hesitated a bit before posting this one, but I felt that it was worth it as they have an odd item on the menu that may attract people and it is best to let them know our opinion. This place Katsugiya is in Ogawamachi near one of the Tokyo engineering colleges, just south of Yasukuni Dori and east of Jinbocho Station. On the Google Maps link below, it shows as being in the middle of the college according to its address, but it is actually in the middle of the south side of the street immediately north. Disappointing number of people in there, perhaps it was the weather today as it has been extremely cold and miserable this week (and last week, etc.) I had heard from an associate at work that the dan-dan men was very good. You can choose your spiciness level from 1 (least) to 5 (most) for all of the dan-dan men and like dishes. I ended up having the shiru nashi paiko dan-dan men (汁なし排骨担々麺), which sort of misses though. It's an interesting combination of flavors. Paiko (or possibly pronounced haiko) is a pork steak or big spare rib, sometimes with the bone-in, sometimes pounded flat, and then grilled in the wok, sort of like tonkatsu but not as deep-fried in deep oil, and with a thinner breading, more like weinerschnitzel. This was chopped up and placed on top of a bed of noodles and cabbage, with some condensed dan-dan men broth, more like a sauce, drizzled on top and more placed in the bowl below it. Something just didn't work for this for me though, it might have been the thin purplish-brown fishy strips that there in there, you see those in some types of yaki-soba also. What this dish needed was more spice (I got a 2, should have gotten a 3 or 4), more salt, less fish flavor and more of some other type of flavor.
Ikemen Blog
Google Maps
梅乃家
千葉県富津市竹岡401
つけ麺目黒屋
千葉県鎌ケ谷市馬込沢3-22
ラーメン二郎栃木街道店
栃木県下都賀郡壬生町本丸 2-15-67
凪
渋谷区東1-3-1
天空記 西糀谷
大田区西糀谷4-27-8
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