Address: #03-02 Millenia Walk, 9 Raffles Boulevard, Signapore 039596
Tel: 63377166
Web Site: http://www.nantsu.com/sg/index.html
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One of the two new ramen joints found at the renovated Parco Millenia walk. Located at a some what odd location but apparently still good enough to attract the crowds. I was there on a weekend with my regular ramen girls at about 2pm. A queue was still there and we waited for about 20 mins before we got our table. Thankfully the waiters will take your orders while you are still waiting in the queue. The noodles were served promptly once we were seated.

Do take some time to browse through the menu, Nantsutei has put in effort to make its menu more interesting than others with pictures of their..boss?

I haven’t ramen (or rather, good ramen) for a while so I was pleasantly surprised by Nantsutei has to offer. Like the other new ramen franchises we see in Singapore, Nantsutei hails from Japan. I figure the Japanese must have discovered that Singaporeans kind of like ramen and are willing to pay good money for it.

I orders Nantsutei’s plain vanilla ramen which starts at $12. It is not that “plain” per se actually, seeing that it came with the standard toppings that we have all come to expect of. A slice of tender and flavourful pork charshu, healthy amount of negi (Japanese spring onion), a piece of dried seaweed and some bean sprouts. Pretty decent I must say. Unfortunately there is no egg, in fact there is no egg in any of the default selections on the menu. You have to explicitly add an egg or expect none. I suppose the reason that they do not include one because the egg is really not their strong point. It is basically a hard boiled egg with an almost solid yolk. Don’t expect it to be of Marutama quality.

Disappointments aside, if the egg is not the selling point, Nantsutei’s broth and noodles definitely are. Its broth is a deviation from the standard milky and rich tonkotsu that we all have come to adore. A layer of black and appetite inducing garlic + sesame oil floats on the surface. You’d expect this to make the already strong broth harder to stomach, but the ma-yu (Japanese for the oil used) actually does the exact opposite. The aroma gives the broth a soothing character and somehow cancels out the oiliness, making this bowl of ramen one of the few tonkotsu ramens that I can empty without the aid of multiple glasses of water (yes, Miharu, I am talking about you, again).

The noodles go well with the soup. Though they are not the kind of hand made and springy kind that you find in certain chinese ramen, but it serves the purpose well. Nothing outstanding that takes away the soup’s limelight.

Suffice to say that the combination of the above is enough to garner the support of the ramen lovers in Singapore. Affordable price for a good bowl of ramen, I see no reason why Nantsutei will not become the new favourite for all.

Doubt that I will ever find the time to revamp this site. I wonder what I am doing with site every time when the domain renewal period approaches.

It doesn’t really record much of my life end I don’t really have anything interesting to write. Or rather I don’t bother to maintain the site.

It might be a sad reflection of my life though. Work eat Dota and sleep. The monotony is eating into me. I suppose this is better than the time I was wowing and not generating any income. Improvement nonetheless.

Report the ramen page? Write a ramen application? I need something fun. And not a new game. Save my already dying attention span.

Address: 2 Orchard Turn, #B3-25 Ion Orchard.
Tel: 65099394

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New ramen franchises are sprouting out every where. Sadly, it doesn’t add to the variety.

The problem with all the new ramen places in Singapore is that there is little difference between shop A and shop B. The distinction is mostly cosmetic, with little changes in the choices offered. As it happens, Aoba is just but another place that sells ramen. Albeit with a tongue numbing soup base.

Aoba’s biggest selling point, if I may say, is that it really sticks to its Japanese roots. The soup base is really as thick and as rich as the Japanese kanban promises. A flavor that most Singaporeans will need to enjoy with multiple glasses of ice water, and a pair of strong kidneys. There are two major flavors in the soup, saltiness and oiliness. Both of which are good in moderation, but Aoba has clearly crossed that line by a huge margin.

I know that Miso is salty. But it is never supposed to be the single ingredient that overpowers everything else. There is no point in cooking up a broth when the end product tastes like diluted miso paste with animal fats. If the selling point of your ramen is the broth, you better make sure that people will actually be inclinded to finish it. Even a salt lover like me couldn’t stomach all the soup in the small bowl, I doubt anyone else will be able to.

The noodles and the char siew are quite standard. Come to think about it now, I am not even sure I remember what they tasted like after the soup numbed my tongue. I guess you have to make a trip down to find out yourself. For the salt-challenged people, I suggest that you try something else besides the miso ramen. Maybe the shoyu and shio ramen will not be as devastating as the miso one.

Aoba is a place to go to if you are a ramen fan like me and is dying to try out all the ramen you can find. If you are not, you might want to venture somewhere else and save yourself that $13 for a bowl of ramen.

Restaurant: Menya Shinchan Japanese Noodle Restaurant

Address: 30 Robertson Quay, #01-05 Riverside View, Singapore 238251.

Telephone: 6732-0114

Ramen is art. Or rather, the owner tries to convince me that it really is.

Menya Shinchan is one of those rare ramen outlets that actually make their own noodles instead of buying the finished product. On the other hand it is also the first ramen restaurant that I have visited to offer seafood based soup.

Ramen soup bases can be broadly categorized into three different kinds: Seafood based, Animal based and Vegetable based. Seafood refers to soup base that is made using the semi-ubiquitous ingredients found in most of the Japanese cuisines. Konbu (a kind of sea weed), Benito Flake (flakes of a preserved fish) and preserved anchovies (or other kinds of fish). Interestingly, Menya offers a good variety of those three mentioned soup bases, which is rather intriguing. But more on this intriguing part later, allow me to talk about the ramen itself.

What I ordered was a bowl of their benito flake (“rich” flavored) miso ramen and a plate of their gyoza. It’s my personal preference that whenever I visit a new ramen restaurant, the first bowl of ramen that I try will be the miso ramen. The reason is simple, no matter how screwed up the underlying soup base is, miso by itself, is able to provides a rich taste to the soup base and acts as a safety net in case the ramen is a total failure. Luckily, it didn’t have to serve that role in Menya.

The soup has an authentic seafood flavor to it, although I couldn’t really tell the underlying soup base, the fragrance from the benito flake is obvious. The taste is mild, yet offers an aftertaste in your mouth that makes you want more of it. The noodles were supposedly handmade, as you can see within the restaurant a room labeled as the “Noodle workshop”. However, I wasn’t able to feel the Q-ness or the “firmness” of the noodles. Though I don’t mean the noodles tasted bad or sub par. It was just not what I expected of handmade ones.

Menya’s gyoza looked quite different from what you would expect. It has this thin layer of flour that will remind you of south Indian dosai sticking to its base. Though the appearance is rather different, the taste doesn’t deviate far from those that I have tried. Do note that they offer more than one type gyoza on the menu. I will be sure to try the other kind when I return, which is almost a certainty due to wide variety of ramen they have on the menu.

The wide variety do lead to the question that I have been dying to ask. Do they prepare all the soup stock themselves? Or do they use commercial ones and then subsequently add in the varying ingredients? My best guess is that they don’t really have that many soup bases, maybe just one of them. Since it takes too much time and resources to prepare all those stock from the grounds up. Even though it is not the best way to handle things, I’d say that Menya offers a refreshing taste against all the tonkutsu ramen out there.