Gyoku/Kawasaki Cityぎょく/玉

 

Gyoku (the on-yomi for "tama", as in "tama negi", see their logo?) is another winner for tonkotsu gyokai in the fair state of Kanagawa-ken. Richer taste than most, and the pork was grilled on the outside and cut more thickly, and had less fat. The noodles are made in-store. Excellent. Not much more to write here. You can take a bus east from the bus stop locations on the southeast side of Kawasaki Station to get to the area quite easily, about 7 mins.

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Tonchin/Kawasaki City屯ちん/川崎市

 
 

The Kawasaki City Tonchin is on the 7th floor of the Moas Building, right across from the various bus stops near the station. Note that in a future review where I cover Gyoku, I will tall you how to take the bus from one of these stations since in order to get to Gyoku it is a rather long walk. In any case Tonchin has two branches in Tokyo (one in Ikebukero, the original store, with long lines frequently, I walk by it whenever I go to the Ikebukero Jiro as it is right down the road) and the other one in Shinjuku, which I have not been to. Tonchin bills itself as true Tokyo tonkatsu ramen, however they offer both ramen and tsukemen. The Kawasaki store also has a fish/pork blend base ramen "uo-ton" (the red and blue buttons in the lower left), and similar chuuka sobas (orange). I had the chuuka soba this time, with extra chashu topping. The pork pieces were large but fairly thin. There was a few of those weird curly menmas in there too. The taste was good but not spectacular. The most popular one according to them is the "toku" one, the one on the upper left of the sign in the picture below.

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Menya Shinnosuke/Kawasaki City麺や 新のすけ/川崎市

 

This is an interesting place and my only Recommended one for this weekend. Along a quite street leading north west from JR Musashi-Shinjo station (Nambu Line) there is Menya Shinnosuke. It's a clean and well-lit shop, a bit like a diner, on the corner of the street. Interesting murals, paintings, and trinkets from Hawaii line the walls and shelves. I didn't ask but I get the sense that the owner lived or visited Hawaii. For whatever reason this place is not on Tabelog or Livedoor. They have a very extensive menu, they are more like a Chinese restaurant than a ramen shop. In any case they have a specially-made (tokusei) dan-dan men that you can choose your own broth style for: tomato, shio, tonkotsu, shoyu. Then they put a generous amount of noodles and also some egg (sort of egg-drop-soup style) in and bring it over. The staff was really friendly and helpful and they have a really wide range of other noodle and side dishes too. The soup was excellent and a huge portion. Clearly this place is a bit out of the way for many people so it is hard for me to suggest that this is worth a special trip but if you are in the area I definitely recommend it.

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Ramen Symphony/Kawasaki/大島ラーメン

    

The Kawasaki Ramen Symphony is another one of these crazy Japanese ramen parks located in a shopping mall. Actually it's not that crazy, it's just 5 ramen shops all together. Smaller than some other ramen parks. In any case it is located in the Kawasaki Be building attached to JR Kawasaki station. You can also get there via the Keikyu line if you walk through the Azalea underground shopping district. The floor that the Ramen Symphony is on is undergoing some serious repair work and most of the floor is closed off, but the 5 shops that make up the ramen smphony are still going strong. In fact they just did a "renewal open" on Sept 6, which is something you see occasionally when a Japanese store wants to convince shoppers that something is new. The 5 different shops are in the pictures aboue, since I had been to Nantsu Tei already and at least one of the others, I decided to go with Mejiro (めじろ). A slightly watery but salty Tokyo-style shoyu, fairly thin noodles (like Hakata tonkotsu) and very large menma. An interesting touch here is a large amount of fried onions in the bowl. The grilled pork was good, the kind that falls apart in the bowl due to all of the fat melting. My only concern about this store is the price and the size - the price with extra chashu was almost 1200 yen, and the portion was not that big. These ramen parks tend to serve smaller portions on the theory that you might try more than one. If you haven't already been to Nantsu Tei, that would be my recommendation instead, if you are a first-time visitor to Ramen Symphony in Kawasaki.

Ramen Symphony home page
Mejiro page
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