Andrew Y.
Google
I really don't want to talk negative about this restaurant, because I do think the people who own this place are doing their best, but there a number of thing they haven't prioritized over the years, which I think they should, if they want to get better ratings.
First of all, the atmosphere. Normally I don't really care about the atmosphere, I just care about whether the food is good, but in here it sort of does impact the food experience. It's really damp in here, because of the cooking of broth of course, but something needs to be done about the ventilation. They have fans, but the back-sides are clogged with dust and what seems to be like spider-webs (it would only take 10 seconds to wipe that off!).
The place is very crowded, it's stacked with big bags of flour on the floor, on the place where customers are supposed to stand in line in order to be served.
The menu is one piece of laminated paper, it's improved from what it was before, but still very far from a somewhat decent menu, both the paper itself, as well as what's written on it. Please add a few more descriptions or pics, or what's in the bowl of ramen.
The chopsticks are single-use and they're much too short and thin to decently eat with these. Is it so much trouble to wash reusable and better quality chopsticks?
As for the most important part, the food. The broth was good. It was thick and gooey, in a good way, which means there's lots of collagen in it, but the taste didn't stand out. It's good enough though if it were complemented with good hand-made ramen, but this was not as I hoped or expected. My guess is they've changed their manufacturing process. The springy and chewy texture was not present, unfortunately, the most important part about ramen.
As for the pork char siu on top, they still have a long way to go there. It was dry, not tender, not fat, tasteless. I couldn't tell whether the pork was marinated or not. Char siu should either be pork belly (which is fatty) or pork shoulder but simmered long enough to become soft. In this case it was the shoulder they served, but it wasn't tender yet. Yes, there were a few parts with fat (if you're lucky you'll get these), but most of it was not.
As for the ajitama egg—also one of the things I look forward to most—this was a slight disappointment. You can see on the picture the yolk was partially well-done, it wasn't cut cleanly (you can see the egg white is sort of broken) and (I'm being very picky here) it should've been marinated a bit longer (the sauce had not seeped to the inside enough) and stirred better so the yolk would've been more in the middle.
As for service, the lady at the counter was very friendly. Nothing to complain about that, but there wasn't much service other than that. It's like a McDonald's where one waits in line and orders at the cashier, gets one's drink himself from the fridge, but has to pay at the cashier at the end again (but wait again in order to pay). That's a logistic problem right there, which is easy to solve.
Please also allow for debit card payments. At least they allow cards, which is better than a few years before, when they only accepted cash, but even today they still don't accept Debit cards, even though that's the current standard and requirement for all banks. Maestro is end-of-life and banks only give out Debit cards now!
