After a good round of yakitori, we needed something more filling to finish off the night. The plan was to go to the ramen place Tokyo Style Miso Ramen Do Miso, but it wasn’t open. Something about having run out of soup… So with no other choice we went looking for somewhere else, and since Gogyo, a Nishi-Azabu ramen shop I’d been meaning to try for ages, has a branch in Ginza, that’s where we went.
It’s around Ginza 2-chome, and it’s seriously upscale right from the entrance. They do serve ramen, but at heart it has an izakaya vibe.
The little starter plates that come when you order
They charge you for these, sadly. I guess you have to think of it as a table charge. The atmosphere is nothing like a ramen shop. You could almost call it a cocktail bar.
The tsukemen I ordered
The noodles were just so-so. They look like soba but don’t taste like soba. They’d be nice eaten cold in summer. Still, for 1,000 yen the portion is a bit skimpy.
The tsukemen dipping soup.
This place is famous for its black miso ramen, which is why the soup is black too.
Even the water comes in a nice glass…
It looks seriously stylish. Would work well as a place to take a date you want to impress.
The house signature, kuro miso (black miso) ramen
As I said in my earlier post on Shodai Keisuke, black miso tastes a bit like jajangmyeon. It’s distinctive and gets good reviews, but a Korean might hesitate a little. You’d basically be paying more than twice the price for jajangmyeon. Well… anyway, it’s not bad. The presentation is great, too.
A kettle for soup-wari (thinning the leftover soup).
Once you’ve finished the tsukemen, you pour the water from this kettle into the soup and drink it. It tasted ordinary. Makes me think I should have just gone somewhere more ordinary if I wanted ramen… Just one of those days when luck isn’t on your side…