Kino/Ookayama基乃/大岡山

 

Ramen Kino is about 5 mins walk southwest from Ookayama Station on the Tokyu Meguro and Tokyu Oimachi lines. It's a small shop with 8 seats at a counter and two very small tables for two. Again this is a very good shop that serves excellent Jiro-like ramen and tsukemen dishes. You can come here and get practically the same exact taste of Ramen Jiro without having to wait on line for 1/2 hour or more at a real Ramen Jiro, not that I have anything against doing that though. There were a couple of free seats in the place when I stopped by, early on a Sunday afternoon. They also have miso-based dishes and a smaller ramen dish, for children I guess. I ordered the shouyu tonkotsu tsukemen with extra chashu and I am pleased to say that this shop comes as close to the true Ramen Jiro taste as just about any other Jiro-like shop I have been to. I ordered "ninniku yasai mashi" which included a large helping of extra veggies as you can see from the picture, since I don't think I've been eating enough vegetables lately. The noodles were more yellow in color than many Ramen Jiro noodles are, but they were very springy and tasty and decently sized (I got the regular size dish, not the omori, it's the same price for more noodles I believe). The yasai were mostly moyashi but there was some cabbage in there, perhaps 80-20. The pork was very good, but thinner-sliced than most Ramen Jiros, but about the same fat/meat level. There were two more slices than you see in the picture, I put them into my soup bowl before I snapped the pic. A TV in the corner was showing various Japanese Sunday news programs. I can definitely recommend Ramen Kino.

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Ramen Hige/Heiwajimaラーメン髭/平和島

 

Today was quite hot and humid in Tokyo, so I really couldn't bring myself to toss down a steaming hot bowl of regular ramen. I decided to head south from the Yamanote-sen loop (via Shinagawa and the Keikyu line) to a place called Ramen Hige (pronounced "hee-geh", it means moustache, whiskers, beard, etc.). Both the February and May 2007 issues of Ikkojin's Ramen for Adults covered this shop. It is descended from the Musashi Kosugi (武蔵小杉) Ramen Jiro and the KoJiro (こじろう) shops, I went in hopes of catching a taste of their abura soba (油そば), a dish that appears on some ramen shop menus in summer. Abura soba is essentially like a regular bowl of ramen except most or all of the hot broth is replaced by an oily shoyu mixture, or in some cases they just leave a 1/2" or so of the original broth in the bottom of the bowl. The general procedure is to then stir up the entire bowl to mix all of the ingredients together. You then have something that has a taste similar to ramen but is not steaming hot. Ramen Hige also throws in a raw egg so if you don't like that be sure to say "tamago nuki kudasai". There was only one other person in the store when I arrived. The pork was very good but quite fatty, some bits were essentially just cubes of fat, since the chef chops up normal-size fatty pork slices (see the O'Taque pictures) into small pieces so that they will stir up easily. My only real concern would be perhaps that there wasn't enough broth at the bottom. Overall it was a generous portion, with fairly thin noodles (thin linguine size) for a Ramen Jiro or decendant.

I definitely plan to come back to this shop once cooler weather returns to Tokyo, in order to take in the full chashu and atsui shiru (hot broth) ramen experience.

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O'Taqe's Blog Review (more pictures)
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MenYa Basara/Ookayama麺屋 婆娑羅/大岡山

   

This is a little bit of an obscure place near Ookayama Station (double or long "o") but it's a special find and merits a Recommended rating. The store is very clean and roomy. Water and tissues are along the side near the back, the ticket machine is in the front on the left when you pass through the door. I had the lunch tsukemen (they only have it at lunch time per the attached links below). The soup base has a distinctive Jiro-like flavor, but with some spicyness added, possibly via something like cloves, and there was an onion taste also. Not nearly as much suspended fat in the broth as Jiro. The noodles are made in the back of the store by the standard-issue giant green noodle machine, with the rolls of noodle dough hanging to the right ready to be loaded and cut. The noodles were very fresh and well done, and the 350g portion was pretty big when the veggies (cucumbers, tomato and moyashi) were heaped on top. Tomato is rare for ramen or tsukemen (not uncommon for hiyashi chuuka though). No pork comes with the base tsukemen however - the single chashu ticket (the one with 豚 on it but without the W on it) gets you two generously thick slices with very little fat, if any, on them. If you buy the W ticket you will get two slices more. If you are in the Ookayama area or stations close by (Midorigaoka, Jiyugaoka, Senzoku) on the Tokyo Meguro or Oimachi lines (Ookayama Station is a junction for the two lines), I definitely recommend you stop by.

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Another Review with Pictures
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Menkobo DanDan/Heiwajima麺香房 暖々/平和島

There are a number of ramen shops that I will (for lack of a better term), refer to on this blog as "Jiro-like". Same salty/slightly peppery/garlicky, fatty shoyu/tonkotsu blend, same thick noodles, same moyashi/cabbage combination as Ramen Jiro. Menkobo DanDan is one of them and I would say it is one of the best of the Jiro-like crowd that I have been to so far. The line was not too bad (around 10 people) at about 2 PM on a Sunday. Nice music inside, very quiet, roomy, no small talk. Not more than 10 seats though. The noodles were fairly katame, probably as al-dente as you would want, and they are the squiggly kind that curl up well with the moyashi. The broth was very salty. I had the tsukemen with chashu (black and yellow chips from the picture page below). Very nice all around.

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