Mia's Review: Marutama Ramen

 This is an extremely late post, for I've visited Marutama @ The Central with Airmeli after our diamond lash workshop held at Blisshouse. I've long heard about Marutama Ramen, it's always one of the names that pops up alongside Santouka (still my favourite!), Ippudo (urgh, too salty) and Tampopo (not bad) when you ask for ramen recommendations. So when Airmeli led me to the ramen shop, I was really excited and cheered, "Oh yay, Marutama!"

 

Their choices of ramen flavour is not really extensive. A very typical menu of an authentic humble ramen-ya. I ordered for myself a daikon and their Nama Karashi Ramen while Airmeli got a Tori Dango and their Aka Ramen.

 Daikon - $4

Yes, you might feel that $4 for 2 pieces of radish (although they're quite big pieces) is pretty much a rip off, but I didn't really care much for the pricey-ness of it because:

1. I really love daikon

2. They're really damn awesome!

The daikon is served almost piping hot in a rich & flavourful savoury broth, which tastes like tonkotsu/chicken broth, and is cooked down extremely well to be amazingly soft throughout. Each and every bite is 'stuffed' full of the savoury taste of the rich broth. I need not even chew on them, but just pushes my tongue towards the roof of my mouth to mash it up and release the broth that was soaked up within. 

Heavenly. Definitely a must try for all daikon lovers out there. 

 Tori Dango (Chicken Meatball) - $5

The Tori Dango is definitely a disappointment, and yes, it's not worth the $5. I expected the dango to be of, well, chewy dango texture. (duh!) But the first bite brought nothing but disappointment to my face. Nothing in this meat-packed ball is chewy. Instead, the entire meatball is soggy and crumbly. A soft bite to the surface easily breaks the dango in half and a few more bites just literally crumbles them into distinctive separate chunks in your mouth. Not my favourite kind of texture in a meatball. 

However, from a cooking noob's POV, I also wonder if it's because they're using a lot of real chicken meat and very little flour.

As for the taste wise, I can't fault them on it but shan't commend them on it either. It's a "typical" meatball taste, flavourful yet nothing distinctive that screams: I'm a chicken meatball! I guess the only thing that hinted it's chicken and not pork is the crumbly texture.

Airmeli's Aka Ramen - $15

 My Nama Karashi Ramen - $12

It looks just like a normal chicken broth ramen, yeah? But it's actually spicy ramen! This is one thing that is kinda intriguing to me. A 100% non-spicy looking spicy ramen!

The broth is rich, flavourful and has the spiciness level just right for me. 

I think I'm just an average spicy food eater, and I do not like to eat challengingly spicy food as I believe it doesn't do justice to the ingredients and preparer of the dish. :)

Comparing the richness of flavour to Santouka and Ippudo, Marutama is definitely smack in the middle. I feel that their broth is definitely richer than Santouka's yet still manageable for me, unlike Ippudo's, which almost killed me. 

Went Ippudo once, and plans never to return.

I do get a little thirsty while eating the ramen, due to the salty flavour of the broth, but I'm attributing it to the fact that I'm more of a lighter taste person. My preference for lighter taste is blatantly hinted in my obvious dislike for Ippudo's ramen.

As for the noodles, it hovers between chewy and hard imo, deviating slightly more towards hard. I'm a chewy (softer) noodle person, and Marutama's noodles really came this close to making it right for me. It was just a little bit too close to the hard side, but I can still accept it as well made noodles. 

The char siu was also pretty well done, having a good mix of lean and fatty meat, cooked to a savoury tenderness.

I'm also rather disappointed that the ramen wasn't served with menma (bamboo shoots) and it wasn't offered as an additional topping or side dishes either. 

And as seen from the picture, the ramen doesn't come with the flavoured egg (typical of many ramen shops) but need an additional $1.50 for an add on. 

Just look at the pictures, need I say more? The $1.50 is a MUST SPEND! 

I first poked my chopsticks into the whites and pulled off a huge chunk of it to reveal a fully intact yellowy orange yolk. I thought the yolk and overcooked, but how wrong I was! Look at how beautifully the glossy orange oozes out from the puncture I made with my chopstick! The egg is definitely well braised to a rich flavour and the whites is cooked to the point of having just solidifying. There's no obviously semi-transparent runny-ness anywhere in the egg whites, and yet they're amazingly soft, tears apart at the slightest pressure and runs down your throat effortlessly. 

I do feel that Marutama does their flavoured egg better than Santouka and Ippudo. :)

And in addition, Marutama offers Kaedama for those big eaters. With leftover broth and an additional $2, you can get your noodles refilled and eat to your heart's content! I'm not sure if it's a full portion refill though, because there's absolutely no way I can ever go for a kaedama. 

For those who've tried their kaedama, please let me know in the comment box!

Till then,

Mia

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Mia's Review: Kotobuki's Ramen

Just recently, I visited this new Japanese restaurant at ZhongShan Mall near one of my working locations with my colleague, as we were craving for some ramen. :)

The restaurant is extremely quiet for a lunch hour (actually the whole Mall is) with only 4 tables occupied, including ours. A flip through the menu (HERE) was pretty impressive with the relatively large selection of choices, even with Chinese/Korean fusion such as Mabo Tofu and Kimuchi Buta Itame (shallow fried pork with kimchi). I was really tempted to get the Kimuchi Buta Itame set but decided to stick to my original craving of ramen in the end, and ordered their recommended Spicy Ramen (spicy pork bone base ramen). The server asked if we would like to have the chilli served separately, and we just nodded our head without any apprehension of her question. Should I say, thank goodness we did.



 

 Spicy Ramen, $15. 

And that's the chilli that was served separately on the small dish, which kind of resemble a watery otah paste. I was all about to dump the entire lot of the chilli into my ramen when I suddenly decided to test out the spiciness. Once again, thank goodness I did, because it's ridiculously spicy for a calm orange paste! And so, I became extremely cautious, picking up minute amount of the paste and stirring it into my ramen before tasting the soup, making sure that the spiciness is still within the acceptable level before going for the next bit. The end result of the spicy ramen looked just like a normal tonkotsu ramen, it looked exactly like the picture on the right, no tinge of the spicy redness at all. But I can assure you, it taste just as spicy, or even spicer (because I always dump a lot of tongarashi nanami powder) than any other red hot spicy looking ramen we find elsewhere.

 And this two picture shows you the amount of chilli I've added into my ramen in total. It really wasn't a lot at all!

The ramen itself was kind of mediocre, with a badly done job for the noodles. The noodles still have the very distinctive taste of 'kee', the characteristic put-off taste of the yellow noodles we find in our prawn mee and lor mee etc. My colleague and I immediately made a face upon our first bite, and we immediately did the same thing. Added more chilli. Lucky us, we both decided to opt for the spicy ramen. I'd say the scary spiciness of the chilli covered up the 'kee' taste splendidly. The noodles' texture itself also has a lot of room for improvement, for I find it a little too tough and not Q (chewy) at all. I know some people prefer harder noodles, but not me. I've yet to go for my root canal and I can't chew well, alright?
Within the ramen were two pieces of charsiu, half of a flavoured boiled egg, menma (bamboo shoots), a handful of greens (I think they're spinach), and a generous topping of bean sprouts.
The charsiu was, OMG, friggin tough! I had a hard time battling with it, which left my colleague clearly amused and slightly bemused. I bit into the meat, hard, 3 times. All I've done was to left my distinctive bite marks on the piece of meat. After more biting, tugging, and chopstick twisting moments, I decided to give up and stuffed the entire piece of meat into my mouth for a long chew down. The meat itself was flavourful, slightly salty, which really wasn't too bad.
But oh please, I was expecting charsiu in my ramen, not bakwa!

The menma and flavoured egg was less disappointing, with the surprise find of a few extremely soft and tender pieces of menma in my bowl of ramen. The menma, although not chilly cold like straight out of the refrigerator, wasn't exactly as piping hot as the rest of the ingredient in the bowl either. So, I can't really decide if the chef has dumped the ready cooked menma straight from the fridge and directly into the ramen. Oh well, I hope not. The flavoured egg, although not as well done as Ippudo and Santouka, was still acceptable after the scare of the noodles and the bakwa charsiu. The outermost rim of the yolk has been cooked through to hard boiled standards, but the insides still remain watery crumbly, while the whites was fully cooked through. Not that bad.

Now to another most important aspect of the ramen, the soup base. I've tasted the soup prior to adding the chilli, just for a better gauge of the taste. I would say, it reminds me greatly of the ramen soup I had when I dined at places like Ajisen and Ramen Play. Tasty, yes. But truly good? Hmm, I can only say I merely drank up less than half of the soup and my glass of Calpis wasn't enough to quench my thirst thereafter.

With this as my first dining experience at Kotobuki, I won't say that I'll never visit this place ever again. But the next time I have a ramen craving, I probably won't choose to go there.

Till then,
Mia

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