Ethereal shio-ramen from Motenashi Kuroki near Akihabara
In Japan, cooking ramen has historically been known as one of the rare vocations accepting of outcasts - part timers who aren't able to land a "real" job, ex-truck drivers tired of commuting at odd hours, bike gang bangers trying to re-enter society. This has obviously changed in recent years and in Japan's ever dynamic ramen landscape, one of the trends has seen classically trained chefs doing a u-turn on their French, Japanese, or Italian roots and opening their own specialized ramen shops. An NYC native by the name of Ivan Orkin, is someone you might recognize who also followed a similar path after graduating from the Culinary Institute of America and working in a few restaurants in New York, before moving back to Japan then slowly establishing his budding Ivan Ramen empire from a quiet little suburb northwest of Tokyo.
This trend has spawned a handful of unique shops that bring creative new approaches and levels of precision and refinement not previously seen in ramen. These chefs turned ramen masters are taking a democratized dish like ramen and filtering it through their refined technique to create something completely new, yet deliciously familiar. It's an amazing thing for a ramen fiend because they are bringing a whole new perspective using their vastly diverse skills and experiences from high-end restaurants and focusing that creativity and energy into an amazing bowl of noodles and soup!
Enter Motenashi Kuroki (饗 くろ喜), one of the best bowls I've had in recent memory and what I feel could be the best bowls of shio, or salt-based, ramen I've ever eaten.
This trend has spawned a handful of unique shops that bring creative new approaches and levels of precision and refinement not previously seen in ramen. These chefs turned ramen masters are taking a democratized dish like ramen and filtering it through their refined technique to create something completely new, yet deliciously familiar. It's an amazing thing for a ramen fiend because they are bringing a whole new perspective using their vastly diverse skills and experiences from high-end restaurants and focusing that creativity and energy into an amazing bowl of noodles and soup!
Enter Motenashi Kuroki (饗 くろ喜), one of the best bowls I've had in recent memory and what I feel could be the best bowls of shio, or salt-based, ramen I've ever eaten.
An outside shot of Motenashi Kuroki
The tiny shop is located between the Akihabara and Asakusabashi area of north-eastern Tokyo. There are only 13 seats, but the interior is impeccably clean and well lit. The shelves are decorated with all the meticulously selected ingredients that go into the Kuroki's secret soup as well as cookbooks from a diverse range of cuisines displaying the chef's background and interests - Kaiseki and French to just name a few.
Trying to beat the weekday lunch rush, I attempted to arrive before noon, but still managed to get caught in a 40 minute queue. I don't enjoy lining up for food, so long waits tend to alter my impression of the food. It's a bias I'm very conscious of, but it's also a great indicator of how much I like a place if I feel the insatiable urge to return and wait in line all over again. Kuroki was one of those experiences; after walking out, I was already trying to calculate the possibility of squeezing another visit in.
Some wonder what's so special about ramen - the soup is basically salt, water, and fat right? What makes it any different then a bowl of chicken noodle soup or even a package of dried ramen? To be perfectly honest, I can totally understand. It's because they've never eaten a bowl of ramen with such complex, deep, and refined flavors; ramen like Kuroki's where you can literally taste the amount of care and effort put into it. Before I moved to Japan, Ramen wasn't a top priority on my 'to-eat' list. I've had what I thought were very good bowls of noodle soup before. I've eaten really good and authentic pho, I've slurped some ramen made in a few restaurants in SF's Japantown. Simply stated, I had preconceived notions and assumed that it couldn't get that much better.
The shio-ramen at Kuroki is the antithesis of the types of ramen I bitched about in an earlier post on my first impressions of SF's current ramen scene. Salt based ramen is said to be one of the most difficult to master because of how subtle the soup is. Balance is extremely difficult to achieve and using too much or too little salt and fat is a consistent struggle. Just to give a recent example, the last shio-ramen I ate a month ago in SF had soup that was under seasoned and lacked fat and depth, so the end product tasted less like a soup and more like pasta water.
Kuroki's shio has so much depth, a multitude of subtle flavors, and complexity that I wouldn't and couldn't do justice with words after just having eaten it once. I needed additional research afterwards to understand more about the minute details that made it so exceptional.
Trying to beat the weekday lunch rush, I attempted to arrive before noon, but still managed to get caught in a 40 minute queue. I don't enjoy lining up for food, so long waits tend to alter my impression of the food. It's a bias I'm very conscious of, but it's also a great indicator of how much I like a place if I feel the insatiable urge to return and wait in line all over again. Kuroki was one of those experiences; after walking out, I was already trying to calculate the possibility of squeezing another visit in.
Some wonder what's so special about ramen - the soup is basically salt, water, and fat right? What makes it any different then a bowl of chicken noodle soup or even a package of dried ramen? To be perfectly honest, I can totally understand. It's because they've never eaten a bowl of ramen with such complex, deep, and refined flavors; ramen like Kuroki's where you can literally taste the amount of care and effort put into it. Before I moved to Japan, Ramen wasn't a top priority on my 'to-eat' list. I've had what I thought were very good bowls of noodle soup before. I've eaten really good and authentic pho, I've slurped some ramen made in a few restaurants in SF's Japantown. Simply stated, I had preconceived notions and assumed that it couldn't get that much better.
The shio-ramen at Kuroki is the antithesis of the types of ramen I bitched about in an earlier post on my first impressions of SF's current ramen scene. Salt based ramen is said to be one of the most difficult to master because of how subtle the soup is. Balance is extremely difficult to achieve and using too much or too little salt and fat is a consistent struggle. Just to give a recent example, the last shio-ramen I ate a month ago in SF had soup that was under seasoned and lacked fat and depth, so the end product tasted less like a soup and more like pasta water.
Kuroki's shio has so much depth, a multitude of subtle flavors, and complexity that I wouldn't and couldn't do justice with words after just having eaten it once. I needed additional research afterwards to understand more about the minute details that made it so exceptional.
- He apparently uses a blend of 6 different types of salt from different areas, mountains, and seas.
- The base of the soup is fortified with a variety of niboshi (煮干し) or dried fish that decorate his shelves - flying fish, saury, and horse mackerel, just to name of a few of the ones that I could recognize.
- His noodles are made in-house in a closet sized space in the back of the restaurant and consist of a blend of different fine ground domestic flours as well as a little whole wheat for texture.
- The toppings, his chashu pork is braised low and slow for 2 days with little salt or seasoning to accentuate and concentrate the flavors of the meat. The other topping, a chicken ham, appears to have the texture of a sous-vide'd meat, but it could also be that it was simmered at a precise temperature and cured slightly.
- Unfortunately, I forgot to add-on an egg so I couldn't try his cured egg that other reviewers have raved about.
- Kuroki also does a few seasonal ramens. He seems to rotate a few new seasonal items every month, depending on what ingredients inspire him. Check out the gallery below. These pictures are directly from his shop's blog.
- Update: The shop has an alter-ego! How cool is that? On Friday's it "morphs" into Murasaki Kuroki (紫 くろ喜). The menu changes it's focus and only serves Japanese soy based soba/ramen. Murasaki means purple in Japanese and it's sushi restaurant slang for soy sauce because I guess the color is sort of purple? The noodle dishes appear to be prominently soy, duck, and Japanese leek based noodle dishes which are very traditional pairings in Japanese cuisine.
