No. 92, Zhonghua 3rd Rd, Qianjin Dist
高雄市前金區中華三路92號
(07)272-8499
Monday-Sunday
11:30am-2:00pm
5:30pm-9:30pm
English friendly: no
vegetarian friendly: yes
average cost: 150-250NTD
If you like ramen, and you live right where I live, you are in luck! This "approved by real Japanese people!" ramen restaurant has a branch right next to my (your) house.
The sign doesn't light up though, and it's sort of tucked away between two giant banks, so you might have to search a little bit before you find it.
The dirty, dark outside is matched by a dirty, bland inside. Also there was a SERIOUS funk in the air when I walked in. I refuse to accept this from any institution not in the business of selling stinky tofu!
Their menu is not English friendly (though it's got some pictures), and actually more Japanese friendly than Chinese friendy. All that hiragana and katakana kind of made me 眼花...
It's a little expensive for noodles in these parts, but not too bad. At the bottom of this side of the menu they have a 170NTD vegetarian ramen option. They also offer Japanese curry on rice, and a nice selection of interesting appetizers.
I ordered the 強棒 ramen, on the assumption that I would receive "strong awesome" ramen. Well! This ramen was fine, but nothing spectacular. The egg was sort of overcooked and the pork was SERIOUSLY overcooked (or just... tough and chewy). The noodles were alright, though probs not handmade, and the soup was pretty okay. It wasn't REAL Japanese ramen though.
I... I think I've been having too much (too many???) noodles lately. The virtue of noodles being noodles is no longer enough.
My friend got some sort of pork ramen thing that looked incredible, but was probably about the same.
We got their fried oysters appetizer, which was awesome. They were about 70% fried, 15% air, and 15% oysters, and the tartar sauce or whatever it was was more like a salsa in that it did not permit dipping whatsoever, but I managed to enjoy them in spite of these difficulties. They tasted like fried. Alright.
Their potstickers, or gyoza for the more culturally enlightened among us, were pretty much exactly like your standard supermarket freezer section potstickers, or those sold at your standard culturally unenlighted American Chinese restaurant. The skin was too thin for me, and the filling uninspiring.
I was initially inclined to give this place a 3, but as I write about it now I'm hard-pressed to remember anything I really liked. Their other menu options could very well be much better (it is supposedly famous, after all), but I don't want to go back to test my luck. Maybe if I get really, really hungry one of these days...
OVERALL RATING: 2/5
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