A slightly unusual ramen shop had been getting popular on Instagram, so I went all the way out to Shimokitazawa to try it.

Entrance

For a place that promotes itself so hard on Instagram, there wasn’t much of a line… Shops like this are usually better skipped… I didn’t think it through…

Menu

Simple.

The wall…

Very much the look of a ramen shop these days…

Shio ramen…

Hmm… here it is. The soup was a pretty standard shio type, and the level was high.

Noodles

These noodles weren’t ramen noodles at all – they were chewy on the level of injeolmi, the Korean rice cake… If you call it the taste of ramen from the future, fine, I guess, but it was closer to udon than ramen, and closer to rice cake than udon… It just didn’t feel like eating ramen. So I left partway through…

The streets of Shimokitazawa…

Honestly, if I’d come all the way to Shimokitazawa… instead of this place there was the far more famous Mintei, there was Senrigan, and there were plenty of other places to go… I felt a real sense of self-loathing over why I’d filled my stomach at a place like this…

The streets of Shimokitazawa

Well… I’ll have to count it as an experience. Other people might like it, even if I didn’t…

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