Seung P.
Yelp
VerdicTL;DR: lots of promise, let down by multiple errors in execution. I really wish I could give it a higher score and will revisit in the future for a re-evaluation.
Kawa is one of the highest rated ramen spots in the Metro Milwaukee region. First impressions upon entering the restaurant are great: clean minimalist design, and extremely friendly service. Even though I came at a busy time, I was seated almost immediately and served just as immediately.
My order was only from the ramen section of the menu, so I can't comment on the vast majority of what Kawa offers. I had their Hellfire Ramen, Extra Spicy -- and I was unfortunately quite disappointed. A Japanese ramen is always made up of multiple elements, coming together to provide a unified experience that, when at its best, is much more than the sum of its parts. In order for that to happen, each element has to be executed to perfection, or at least correctly. Let's go over the elements in this dish, one by one.
The broth is, alongside the tare, the soul of any ramen. Kawa only has a tonkotsu broth -- tonkotsu is a fatty, aromatic bone broth that is difficult to make properly, and to Kawa's credit, it chooses to only offer tonkotsu. That makes it more likely for it to be good, and on Kawa's website they say that the experts from Japan were flown in to perfect the recipe. I think I can believe that to some degree: most tonkotsu broth you can find in our area is mediocre to flat out bad. Kawa's broth, in contrast, is perfectly serviceable.
Here's where (un)truth in advertisement comes to bite Kawa though. For a menu item called "Hellfire", it's barely spicy at all. I'm not some masochist who loves torturing himself with Carolina Reapers or something -- so I'm not asking for some kind of spice challenge. I do, however, expect there to be some kick -- and there was none. I can taste that there was an effort to add spice -- but that the spice is completely overwhelmed and absorbed by the (appropriate) fattiness of the tonkotsu broth. In Japan, when you make a spicy ramen with a tonkotsu broth as a base, you would add at least double the spice compared to what my bowl had, in order to balance against the neutralizing effect of the fat.
Moving on to the noodles (which are the heart of ramen, if the broth is the soul) -- they were served overcooked and underdrained. Every ramen place I've been to in our fair city does this, probably due to a fundamental misunderstanding of how ramen noodles should be cooked. Because of the alkaline nature of the noodles, if you overcook the noodles you'll get a slimy texture, and if you underdrain the noodles you will introduce water and starch into the broth that destroys the balance. Kawa's noodles should have been cooked a full minute less than they were, and they should have been drained more vigorously. Because of all of this, the noodles were unable to serve as a proper carrier for the broth, and the mouth feel was not altogether pleasant.
The chashu was tough, chewy, and underseasoned. Chashu is supposed to be very tender and devastatingly flavorful -- so when you get chashu that tastes the way that Kawa's does, that's generally an indication that the braise was not properly done -- probably cooked at too high a temperature for too short a time. They say that they apply a char to the chashu before serving, and I saw no evidence of that either.
Finally, the ramen egg was technically well cooked, but it was once again quite underseasoned. You need to immerse your egg in your shoyu tare for many hours, and it's clear to me that this time was cut short. That's disappointing, as the egg is usually one of my favorite parts of the experience.
So what do we have in the end? In my case, it's an experience that winds up being far less than the sum of its parts. Each error in execution by itself might be forgiveable -- but when put together, I ended up with a bowl that was memorable for all the wrong reasons.
I wish there were some way I could assign individual scores for different parts of the experience. I really want to like Kawa. I think there are some things they are doing well. It's clear that they're trying very hard. So I'll be back to try them again sometime, in the hopes that my experience this time was just a bad one -- a one-off, rather than a theme.
