There is a 'counter area', but it's actually a table, with normal chairs, so you don't have to coordinate your balance as well as your chopsticks. The atmosphere here is a bit different to most ramen places I've been to, where customers quickly inhale their noodles and leave. Have a look, as it's only a ten-minute walk from Rikuen-Ochiai station, on the Senzan line. Menkui literally it means ''noodle eat (place),' so you know it's good if they can attract customers with such a simple name. Menkui is the latter, and it beats the chain stores hands down. There are both chain stores and smaller, independent ones here. But I have to caveat that I would have a much dimmer view if both toppings appeared in the shoyu bowl–as the menu suggests–because I think they would be poor fits in terms of texture and flavor, respectively.Ochiai isn't a tourist destination by any means, but all of the locals know that it's the place to come for great ramen. The kikurage was fine and while I’m not a fan of beni shoga (pickled red ginger), it did complement the tonkotsu broth well. The menma were good and there was a lot of it without paying extra, so a nice bonus. It’s far from egregious however, and ajitama yolks are subject to personal preference (though anything other than a jelly-like yolk is wrong and you are a bad person). Depending on one’s preferences, the ajitama could also be considered as falling short, since the yolk was more solid than jelly-like, cooked for 30-60 seconds longer than it should have been. The two thick slices I had were generous, but they were overly suffused with shoyu/mirin flavor and had a tendency to break off in to chunks I speculate that that perhaps the chashu had been overly marinated before roasting. Miyagi’s chashu reflects the current trend of serving slices of roasted pork belly coils that are grilled or blowtorched before serving. Other elements of this bowl were a mixed bag. Each bowl does seem to come with more ramen than is the norm for most ramen shops, so that’s something to bear in mind when working up an appetite. My server informed me that though MIyagi makes its own noodles, it follows a one-size-fits-all policy where the same noodle is paired with every broth, which I think is an oversight and unfortunate. They may have been too understated: I thought they were fine but could’ve left a stronger impression with me, perhaps by adding more kansui into the dough to give it more bounce. Miyagi’s noodles had none of the alkali rubberiness or crimping of sourced ramen instead they had an understated taste to them, with machine-cut, square edges signalling how they were made. This is a function of most American shops selecting noodles based on what’s popular in a supplier’s catalog, creating a vicious circle that limits the variety of noodles in the ramen shop ecosystem, divorced from the actual qualities of a noodle and its suitability for different broths. Sourced noodles can be of good quality–Menya Hosaki used Sun Noodles for a few months when COVID-19 shut down its normal supply from Shimamoto Keizo–but they tend to be the uniformly rubbery or overly crinkled kind you see in many places. I also paid close attention to the fresh, made in-house noodles, which is a relatively rare for most shops since they are more apt to order ramen noodles from the likes of Sun, Kobayashi, and Nishiyama rather than making it themselves or getting them fresh.
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