Baruch Foodies
Welcome to Baruch Foodies, a blog dedicated to the person with an appetite for food. This blog is aimed to give you a unique perspective of the food scene in New York City. As students at Baruch College, located in the heart of the City, we understand what it’s like to live in the city and be surrounded by great restaurants, great cuisines, and great cultures. We are four authors, each with our own special take on places to eat as well as some homemade dishes for when the wallet or the time is tight. Please look through this blog and feel free to comment and share this blog with your friends and family.
Baruch Foodies Team
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JAPAN is dotted with wonderfully workaday ramen shops, places that are especially compelling when the weather turns cold. The lunch crowd squeezes into a narrow space shrouded in steam pouring from soup bowls, stock brews on open flames beyond the counter, and beside it a man pulls fresh noodles. The only sounds come from the bubbling pots and the clatter of chopsticks and spoons in bowls. Outside, the air is cold and thin; inside, the soup is hot and rich. Lunch at these places is, at once, otherworldly and comforting.
A bowl of vegetarian ramen at Totto.
New York has been hit lately with a run of ramen shops of its own. Two of the newest are the East and West Side cousins, respectively, Hide-Chan Ramen and Totto Ramen, on polar ends of 52nd Street. Both are owned by Bobby Munekata, of Yakitori Totto, who worked on the menus with a chef from Hakata, Japan — pork-based ramen’s home region. Neither spot has nearly the brilliance of Ippudo NY, in the East Village, or the breadth of other Midtown ramen shops like Menchanko-Tei, but each has its specialties, and one or two of them are very worth eating.
Of the two cousins, Totto Ramen, 366 West 52nd Street, (212) 582-0052, better evokes the rustic shops of lunch-hour Japan. Here, a few steps below street level in an alleylike space, you can sit up-close at the counter and watch guys in head scarves stir cauldrons of broth and char slabs of boiled pork with a blowtorch for the house specialty, chicken paitan ramen, a rather minimalist soup of chewy egg noodles, scallions, onions, nori and a few tender slices of char sui pork in a deeply chicken-y base ($9.25). You can have it with wavy noodles (not made with eggs) and a dollop of miso ($10.25), which adds too much salinity, or order it spiked deliciously with rayu, the chili-sesame oil ($10.25).
This oil is better still when mixed into the vegetarian ramen, a many-hued seasonal salad made soup ($12). This time of year, red leaf lettuce, baby spinach, red bell pepper, enoki mushrooms, avocado and a dash of citrusy yuzu paste are bright against the umami hum of the konbu-shiitake broth poured over organic noodles, and the spicy oil brings all the flavors into further relief. Add a mirin, sake and soy-marinated boiled egg, and you have your protein ($1 extra). With a meal this smart and pretty to look forward to (and a cute, young staff and crowd to add pep), the typical half-hour wait outside for a seat almost seems like fun.
On the other hand, Hide-Chan Ramen, 248 East 52nd Street, (212) 813-1800, itself a franchise of a Japanese chain, is a squatter in the second-floor location vacated by one of Mr. Munekata’s yakitori bars: the funky aroma of pork bones boiling for the Hakata-style tonkotsu broth feels incongruous in the unrenovated space, and the piped-in dance music only makes matters worse.
Behind the bar, pork dumplings are pinched into form. The dumplings are fine, though other starters — wan pickled vegetables, salty pollock roe, cloying sesame string beans — are skippable (appetizers $3.50 to $6).
The reason to be here is the tonkotsu ramen, served plain, spicy, with miso or with extra pork ($9.50 to $11). The best version by far, though, is the Hakata kuro ramen, served ma-yu style, with a dose of powdery burned garlic in oil to darken a white broth rich in pork fat ($9.75). The ramen is a terrific mash-up of textures and flavors: crunchy kikurage mushrooms, melting nori, sharp scallions, soft, sweet pork and a tangle of springy noodles. The charred garlic oil — slightly sour and boomingly earthy — buoys the meaty base and lifts the entirety into heady deliciousness.
If the only ramen you’re used to eating is heated in the corporate dining-room microwave, you should get out of the office building and climb Hide-Chan’s stairs. The jury-rigged environs might not ever match those of the iconic Japanese ramen shop, but that inky, full-flavored Hakata kuro ramen is a long, long way from the foam cup.
Totto Ramen
