Location: Sapporo, Japan
Author: My Husband
Boy, it’s been a month since our last post! Well, what better time to jump back in than now, with so many Vancouver blogs posting about ramen? I thought it might be interesting to compare pictures of “Vancouver Ramen” with “Japanese Ramen”, so I’m putting up this post about our ramen meal from day 2 of our Sapporo trip.
Truth be told, I don’t eat a lot of ramen in Vancouver. My wife and I have tried many of the local ramen places, and though they serve up very decent bowlfuls, we think there’s still that little something that’s missing. It’s like eating Vancouver satay vs Singapore satay – there’s just that little je ne sais quoi in the Singapore version that makes eating the “real deal” so much more enjoyable.
To pick up where I left off with my previous post – Christina and I slept like babies during our first night in Sapporo. This, I attribute to our relative lack of sleep the day before. We spent the second day in Sapporo exploring many of the interesting food places and restaurants that Christina read about, and boy, was the eatin’ ever good. We pretty much hopped from place to place stuffing our mouths (and tummies), and we started inventing new mealtimes simply because… well, simply because there was something we ran across that we had to try. Like for example, there was one hour between “second-afternoon-tea” and dinner that was begging to be filled – so we came up with “ramen hour” to fill it.
We named it “Ramen hour” because we found ourselves in the vicinity of Sapporo’s famed “Ramen Yokocho”, a small alley off a side street in Susukino that housed an amazingly large number of ramen shops.
View from one end of Ramen Alley.
The board at the entrance of the alley describing each of the ramen shops and their house specialty. Talk about choices.
We didn’t know which one to choose, so we “eeni-meeni-money-moed” our choice. We ended up at this place, which I suspect was eponymously named.
”Ramen hour” was around 5:30pm in the afternoon, which was way too early for dinner. We had the run of Ramen Alley to ourselves at that time of day. Peeking into each of the shops, we saw the noodle chefs all doing the prep for that service; there were hardly any other customers in the alley except for us.
We stepped into Kunimitsu Ramen Shop, which only had one U-shaped bar/seating area. Ramen shops are not places where you would want to hang around after eating your noodles. Etiquette dictates that you order, eat, pay, and leave.
Since this was a meal in between “second-afternoon-tea” and dinner, my wife and I ordered one bowl of miso ramen (which apparently was originally “invented” in Hokkaido) and some gyoza to share. Here’s our food:
Very nicely fried gyoza.
Miso ramen. This was a very nice bowl of noodles, with a rich – yet puzzlingly light – miso tonkotsu broth. The fatty cha su was a nice accompaniment, portion control (i.e. 2 slices) meant that the fat never overpowered your tastebuds. The noodles were cooked to a degree of doneness that was psychically aligned with our desires that afternoon. And the half-boiled egg was just perfect.
We enjoyed the egg so much, we ordered another one. We ate half of it before remembering to snap a photo:
Perfect half-boiled egg.
The ramen was slightly different than what we had in Tokyo from a previous trip, but I think I’m more partial Hokkaido’s version. One shop down, seventeen more to try. Methinks we’ll be headed back to Sapporo sooner rather than later.
