With Uber Eats doing so well, there are quite a few delivery-only ramen places around. With delivery ramen it’s one of two things: they either cook the noodles and send them, or they send you raw noodles. But when you’ve gone to the trouble of ordering delivery, boiling the noodles at home is a hassle, so I almost always end up ordering the pre-cooked kind. Among the countless ramen shops out there, there’s one that only does delivery and has deals with renowned shops, so I gave it a try. It’s called RAMEN EX.. and rather than serving just one shop’s ramen, it seems to relay ramen from a number of famous places.

Oborozuki’s tsukemen

This is the tsukemen from Oborozuki, a ramen shop famous for the queues it draws in Ginza. This one isn’t RAMEN EX.. I was just curious that a renowned shop like this does delivery, so I ordered it.

The broth

Maybe because I ordered the pre-cooked noodles, the spring in them was a bit disappointing, but the broth was top-tier. (Then again, disappointing noodles in tsukemen is a pretty serious flaw..) It has the presence you’d expect from a renowned shop.. Someday I’d like to queue up and eat it there.

This is Nakiryu, ordered through RAMEN EX.

Nakiryu is the Michelin-famous tantanmen shop in Otsuka. It’s a bit far to make a special trip for, so it’s a place I only knew by name.

Roughly this is what comes in it..

The soup packets

There’s a manual for putting it together: you drop the noodles into the broth and microwave it for about four minutes. That solves both the problem of pre-cooked noodles going soggy and the hassle of boiling raw ones..

Gyoza

Well.. as a side dish it was perfectly decent

Fried rice

This wasn’t bad either.

The final result..

Tasting it, it’s not bad. I imagine it would be much the same eaten in the shop. That said.. it did leave me wondering whether this is really tantanmen.. There’s less of that nutty richness, so it comes across as clean and restrained.. A style like this may score well with Michelin, but whether it’s delicious I’m not so sure.

Sapporo miso ramen, Sumire

Sumire is a hugely famous miso ramen shop, and to think they do delivery too.. These days they apparently have a branch in Yokohama as well as Sapporo. Even so, it’s far enough that going to eat there isn’t easy..

The finished bowl

Miso ramen has to be rich to be good.. and this was genuinely rich, so I was very happy. This is what miso ramen is supposed to be.. The one shame is that there are no options like extra toppings.. If you could add something like an ajitama egg, it would have been even better.

Fried rice

The fried rice was tasty too — a renowned shop, as expected.

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