Lunch: Ippudo

The most popular restaurant in my neighborhood is one I haven’t been able to visit until now. Every time I walked by Ippudo, it was mobbed, the plate glass window full of the forlornly hungry faces of gastro tourists and dedicated locals. Waits were usually an hour or more, which meant we usually walked away shaking our fists and saying, “It’s just soup, people! Get a grip!”

In cases like this, you usually try to console yourself by getting the same dish in a nearby alternate restaurant. But now that I’ve actually been able to eat at Ippudo, I can report that it can be revelatory – and not nearly the same as your average ramen place around the corner.

Ippudo can be a polarizing restaurant, but the difference in opinion can often be traced to what people order. Don’t go here for the shoyu ramen ($13) – not because it’s bad – it’s actually quite good. The soy sauce-flavored ramen noodle in chicken and tonkotsu soup comes loaded with pork, cabbage, spinach and seaweed, and the broth has a wonderful perfume of scallion and sesame oil. But good shoyu ramen is a traditional Japanese dish that you can find at any number of ramen places in Little Tokyo near East 9th Street, most notably Minca on East 5th, according to D., who’s had the real thing in the old country.

If you’re going to wait for the ramen at Ippudo, focus on the left side of the menu and go for the shiromaru hakata ($13), above, or the akamaru modern ($13), top, both specialties of the Ippudo restaurants in Fukuoka, Japan. Not only do these ramen soups contain chef Shigemi Kawaraha’s springy, thin, vermicelli-like “original tonkotsu” noodles, the milky, soft broth of the shiromaru hakata, above, is tranporting. Like a whiff of perfume on a stranger on the street that summons up a specific place and time, it’s this concoction of silky pork fat with a spike of salty fishiness (from bonito flakes?) that can lead Ippudo fans to wax fanatic.

No effort is spared in creating the perfect broth. Kawaraha doesn’t reveal the exact mix of ingredients, but to get the slightly gelatinous texture and clean flavor, he boils pork bones for 15 hours or more, which also gets rid of the overly porky taste of many ramen soup bases. This technique is specific to Fukuoka, attracting Japanese people from the region in much the same way that boiled peanuts like the “dirt caviar” at Baohaus call out a siren song to Georgians in NYC.

The mash up of thinly sliced, melt-in-your-mouth pork chashu, pickled ginger, cabbage, scallions and boiled egg flavored with soy sauce add their own riotous mix of flavors to the shiromaru hakata. The same broth is the basis for the akamaru, but this ramen gets a hit from a dollop of peppery red sauce and garlic oil.

The soup is about the only relaxing thing about dining at Ippudo, where waiters shout out when diners enter or leave, when they order and whenever an order comes to the table. All this activity happens in a room that’s contrarily Zen, outfitted with white walls, wooden counters, feng-shui’d booths, a massive bamboo sculpture  and shocks of red color accents throughout.

It would be a good date place if you already know your date well, because you may not be able to hear what your date is saying at one of the communal tables. But the bustling atmosphere is also a signal that Ippudo doesn’t take itself too seriously: witness the bar inlaid with squares of packaged ramen noodles. It’s an easy place to dine alone though, especially at lunch, when a solo diner can often get through the line much faster than a party of two or more. Otherwise, parties of five, six or more may have luck getting one of those booths.

Though there are a number of new restaurants in New York that don’t live up to the hype, Ippudo isn’t one of them. This is one crazy popular restaurant that deserves its cult following. And once you taste Shigemi Kawaraha’s particular brand of Kool Aid, chances are you’ll be back.

Ippudo
65 4th Avenue, between 9th and 10th Streets
New York, NY
ippudo.com