My wife and I were in New York for a few days, and of course had to check out the New York ramen scene. After spending far too much time slogging through online postings about the best ramen house in NYC, we finally settled on Rai Rai Ken in the East Village for 2 reasons: their specialty is shoyu ramen (most of the other highly touted ramen houses specialize in tonkotsu), and the place just plain looked cool from a picture I found on the net.
We headed there for an early dinner. After reading about the half hour/hour wait times, we wanted to try to avoid the crowd. We smiled in giddy anticipation when we got there: the place might as well have been transported from a hole-in-the-wall in Japan. There is a wonderfully aged wood counter and room for about a dozen people, plus a small counter facing the window looking out. If you look closely at the side of the wood counter, you’ll even see small ramen-bowl shaped insets (close-up picture after the jump)! Of the ramen houses I’ve been to in the U.S., this one gets an “A” for ambience alone.
We ordered the shoyu ramen, and a side of gyoza. The shoyu ramen comes with scallions, bamboo shoots, spinach, naruto (fish cake), sea weed, half a hard-boiled egg, and of course, the sliced pork.
The first thing we did when the ramen arrived was try the soup. Mmm…the soup was mild but with a distinct shoyu flavor. I thought it was a bit on the simple side, without too many other distinct flavors, but good. The noodles were good, with good flavor. They soaked up the soup nicely, and were firm and tasty. I thought they could’ve been just a tad bit firmer but the wife thought they were perfect. The toppings were also good, especially the shinachiku was nicely seasoned and had a bit of snap. The pork was thick and flavorful, but far too lean for my taste. Overall the ramen was good, but I couldn’t help but feel that it was missing something to make it more than decent. The wife, on the other hand, thought it was a really good bowl of ramen, and was quite pleased with our selection.
We also disagreed a bit on the gyoza. We both thought the filling was really good, filled with minced pork and veggies, but I wasn’t too crazy about the limp texture of the skin. To me, the texture was more sui jiao (Chinese boiled dumpling) than gyoza, but my wife adored them.
Overall, I was a bit disappointed, and even more so when we (in this order):
1. returned to our hotel
2. read about the grand opening of Setagaya that same night!
Talk about timing! Ah well, there’s always next time!
I gotta say I had really high expectations after reading all the positive reviews about Rai Rai Ken, so that might have contributed to my disappointment. The ramen was good, and we will definitely return the next time we’re in New York!
Rai Rai Ken’s shoyu ramen gets a 7. (The decor gets an 9!)
Rai Rai Ken
214 East 10th Street
New York, NY 10003
(212) 477-7030