Needing to top up on carbs, I headed to Nagi, a ramen shop that’s supposed to be doing pretty well in Shinjuku. There are three Nagi shops in Shinjuku, and the one I went to was the Nishi-Shinjuku branch near my hotel. This place is best known for its niboshi chuka soba, and the textbook move at a place you’re visiting for the first time is to order its most popular dish, so normally that’s what I’d have had, but this time my friend insisted hard and we went for tsukemen.
Hono no Tsukemen with every topping piled on
Hono no Tsukemen (“Flame Tsukemen”) is Ramen Nagi’s second brand. It looks like they set it up because demand for spicy ramen took off after Moko Tanmen Nakamoto. It wasn’t as spicy as I expected, at least for a Korean palate. The style is something like maze-soba and tsukemen rolled into one, and it feels almost too trendy, if that makes sense. It tasted fine, but since we came here as a second round after drinking, what I really craved was plain ramen in a niboshi-style broth. This is what they call true middle-aged-guy mode..
Dipping broth
A soy sauce base with chili powder in it. Just the kind of style Japanese diners would love.
Tsuke Express “Ginga”
This is what I ordered. A regular niboshi tsukemen. I didn’t order any extra toppings.
Dipping broth
The goodies are hidden in the broth, and there’s so much of it you wonder whether you need extra toppings at all. It tastes like the classic, textbook tsukemen. The thin noodles seemed a bit better than the regular ones, but anyway, I’ll just have to be happy that I managed to squeeze in some ramen at all on this trip. These days I’m so busy that even getting a bowl of ramen is a struggle.