Ippudo TAO @ UE Square - TAO Kuro

This week's ramen adventure brings me to Ippudo TAO at UE Square, along Mohamed Sultan Road.

It took over the space previously occupied by Ah Yat Seafood... the ramen empire is taking over the abalone world!

Ippudo TAO is Ippudo's second outlet in Singapore. And it is not a simple replicate of its first outlet like the others. It is a new concept store borne out of a collaboration between Ippudo and a Japanese drum group TAO, both originating from Kyushu. It is a collaboration between ramen and art.

How apt this is!

Ramen, an art form itself (to me), is collaborating with another art form.

And art has it commercial angle too, and this collaboration will further push TAO's branding and awareness.

A little bit more on TAO, it is a internationally renowned Japanese drums (Taiko, 太鼓) group that has been performing around the world, including Europe, America and Australia. You can see a video about TAO here.

This collaboration is also not a one-off effort too. For the purpose of this new concept, Ippudo and TAO actually set up a joint venture company to promote the new concept worldwide. The first outlet was opened in Fukuoka in April 2010, and the 2nd one here in Singapore in August. A 3rd outlet was opened in Ginza, Tokyo recently in September.

Isn't it amazing that we got it even before Tokyo?

The restaurant has booth indoor and outdoor seats that offer a different feel. The interior of the indoor part is modern, using a black-red-and beige color scheme, giving it an atmosphere of a restaurant bar. The music played is some upbeat music.

Whereas on the outside, the setting is simpler. The seats have a view to a screen projecting TAO's drum performance on it. With the drum beat energetically pounding in the background, this section of the restaurant gives it a more Japanese atmosphere, which I prefer more.

... well but at sat indoors this time :)

wall decoration

This wall decoration of drummers I guess echoes the theme of the restaurant. What is interesting is that it is made up of hundreds of small discs hanging of a nail. It must have taken a lot of effort to assemble this.

random shot - new napkin

Time to go into the food...

Ippudo TAO's menu differs from the Ippudo's in 2 ways.

First, it offers yakitori as one of its key items.

As I'm a fan of yakitori too, I ordered my favourite tsukune to try.

Served in a stone plate, the tsukune was grilled well and it was delicious.

What's more, it came with a tool to help the helpless foreigners to take out the meat from the skewer! I've been to quite a number of yakitori store, and I don't remember so far that I've come across this. Good job!

Although I prefer to bite the yakitori off its skewers, I took a try. And indeed it is quite easy to use.

The 2nd difference is in its ramen. Ippudo's Shiromaru and Akamaru has taken a side-step, and the key ramens here are called TAO Kuro (Black) and TAO Aka (Red). Both of them are still based on tonkotsu soup that Ippudo is good at, arranged in a new way to represent the spirit of TAO.

I ordered the signature TAO Kuro, with an additional egg.

(Still have gripes about them not having egg as a default topping...)

TAO Kuro has a tonkotsu-shoyu soup base and topped with pork-belly char siew, black fungus, spring onion, uma-dama (special blended miso ball), and charred fragrant oil that gives it the "kuro" look.

Taking a closer look...

It uses not the typical narrow noodles of kyushu's tonkotsu ramen, but a thick, curly and noodle that is bouncy and catches the soup.

Similar to the other Ippudo ramen, TAO kuro is a well-made and delicious. I particular like it thick taste and also the noodles that matches the dish well. I have not yet watched any performance by TAO so I'm not sure if it has expressed TAO's spirit, but its definitely a good bowl.

This Ippudo, I guess due to its location, has no queue too!

Many a times I was trying to go to Ippudo after work, but once I see the long queue I was put off. (Sorry that my love for ramen doesn't go as far as queuing up for 30 mins after a long day at work..). For the Ippudo lovers out there including myself, it is a way to have the same good taste without the queuing.

And I'll sit outside next time to see TAO's performance on the screen!

The Ippudo and TAO JV aims to expand this concept to more territories.

And its expansion plans involves opening of a theater restaurant in Broadway of NY!

Who could have imagined that a theater restaurant will one day serve ramen!?!

Looking forward to their opening in the future.

View Ramen Walker's Ramen Map in a larger map

Ramen Data - Ippudo TAO @ UE Square
Address: 207 River Valley Road #0-55-56, UE Square
Types: Tonkotsu

Making Ajitama (味玉)

This week's ramen adventure brought me to... making my own ajitama (flavoured egg)!

I went around the net to look for some recipes on the net, and found these few that I referenced the egg-making journey from.

(In Japanese)

http://cookpad.com/recipe/188024

http://cookpad.com/recipe/212285

ingredients...

The ingredients are:

Egg (of course!) .............. 6 pcs

For the sauce where the eggs will swin in:

Ginger ...................................................... several pcs

Garlic ........................................................ 2 cloves

Green parts of leeks ............................... 2 stalks

Soy Sauce ................................................. 50cc

Mirin ......................................................... 50cc

Water ........................................................ 100cc

Sesame Oil, Chili Oil, Dashi Stock .......... a little

First, chop up the garlic, ginger and leeks. I guess these will give additional flavour to the sauce.

Next, add the ingredients for the sauce (water, soy sauce, etc) into a tupperware. It already looks delicious at this stage!

The sauce bath is now ready! Moving on to making the soft-boiled egg, which I guess will be one of the most tricky part of making ajitama.

Following the instruction, I started boiling the egg from room-temperature water...

... and prepared a ice bath to cool down the eggs for easy peeling after the egg is boiled and also to stop the cooking process.

About 4 minutes after the water started boiling, I took the eggs out and cooled them in the ice water bath.

Next comes the peeling of the shell.... and it was hard!

I guess some of my steps in preparing the egg was not right, and several of them became casualties along the way...

Because the eggs were half-boiled, the eggs were very soft and delicate. As I was peeling off the shell carefully, the egg white broke off for a few of the eggs, and the semi-cooked egg yoke oozed out. Oops!

I must try out other methods to make this step work...

Well, moving on, the survivors are put into their soaking bath. This looks good!

The recipe recommends to soak it for 3 days.

It was a long wait, and I was eager to find out how my first attempt in making ajitama went.

Took it out every day to see how they are doing.

This is after day 2... the eggs picked up quite a bit of color!

On day 3, it is ready to be eaten...!

It has totally taken on the color of the sauce, and looks like what it is served in the restaurants.

... and the moment of truth to see how it the critical part of the ajitam - the yoke - went.

Hmm... it is not as flowy than I've expected.

But nonetheless it look pretty good, and it tasted good as well!

According to the receipe, the yoke will harden in the process of soaking in the sauce. I think I have to control the length of boiling and the soaking time accordingly to make the yoke harden in the right way at the end.

Will be trying to make ajitama again and perfect it!

Ramen ranks No. 2 in the ranking for the most loved Japanese food by tourists!

Just caught a report released by the Japan National Tourism Organisation (JNTO) about a survey conducted to 15,355 foreign tourists to Japan.

On the question of "Which was the most satisfying food that you've had in Japan", ramen came in as No. 2!! Very interesting results from the perspective of a ramen fan.

Sushi was No.1 with 42.1% of vote. Pretty much expected, as Sushi is usually the first thing that comes to a foreigner's mind when we talk about Japanese food. And the sushi in Japan is definitely good too! Even chains such as Tenka Sushi serves decent sushi.

Ramen is No.2 with 20.8% of the vote, closely followed by sashimi at 19.8%. In 4th place is Tempura, 11.1%, and Udon at 8.9%. This is an encouraging result (for me), as ramen is a much younger cuisine than sashimi, tempura and udon. I doubt many foreigners will know what ramen is 10 years ago, while sashimi, tempura and udon are fairly common.

Isn't it amazing that ramen rose so fast through the ranks of Japanese food?

Some other interesting results are:

- For Taiwanese, Ramen is actually No.1! The ramen culture must have already been widespread there.

- For Singapore, the percentage of the top 3 of Sushi, Sashimi and Ramen are pretty close.

- German loves sushi? About 63% of them answered that it was the most memorable.

I'm sure in years to come, it will become as popular, if not more, than sushi!

Looking forward to the 2010 survey to see how the result will change.

Crab Ramen - Keisuke Tokyo (けいすけ東京)

Visited Keisuke Tokyo a while ago, and found that they have updated their menu with a few new items - the basic-styles of Shio Ramen and Shoyu Ramen.

But what caught my eyes among the new edition is the Crab Ramen (S$15.8)!

This should be the only place in Singapore that is serving this ramen (except for the $30+ ramen at Aoba and Kaiko that has half a crab on top of it... not sure how many bowls of those do they actually sold), so I gotta try it out.

Kani Ramen

Topped with a large piece of char siew, 2 halves of an egg, naruto, menma, onion, shreds of chilli and seaweed, the ramen is arranged in the usual keisuke aesthetics. The aroma of the crab can be smelled immediately when the ramen is dished in front of me. The soup stock is very thick and dense, which I guess was meant for it to serve as more of the sauce of the "dry noodle", for it to hang onto the noodles.

According to an interview that owner-chef Takeda had with Zaobao, the soup is made by first frying the crab. The fried crab is crushed and blended with onion and carrot, and the mixture is again fried. Chicken broth is the mixed with the paste to create the soup.

I also noticed that for the Crab ramen, the flat noodles is used instead of the usual rounded ones.

All in all, its another good bowl of ramen. It will be suitable for those who likes it rich and thick.

In the interview, Takeda-san also shared that he will be releasing new items on his menu every 2-3 months for this Singapore outlet. Looking forward to his new creations for Singapore.

Kusabi (くさび) - Tokumaru Shoyu Tonkotsu Ramen

This week's ramen adventure brings me to Kusabi at Central, the latest edition to Singapore's ramen scene.

... taking over Kyoto Sabo’s space

Kusabi (くさび) comes from the Fukushima prefecture of Japan, about 2 prefectures north of Tokyo. It is a relative unknown prefecture in Singapore, but from the ramen world, it is home to one of the famous ramen styles call Kitaka Ramen (喜多方らーめん). But Kusabi does not serve ramen of that style.

The word "Kusabi" means "a wedge" in Japanese, which is a tool that is used to fill up a gap, and it is what the store hopes that its ramen will do. Kusabi was voted as the #5 ramen places in Fukushima prefecture in the 2008 Yahoo Japan ramen ranking. But it seems that it has slipped off the ranking in 2009.

The interior is brightly-lit, clean and neat. The staff were friendly and polite too, most probably trained in the Japanese way by the owner. Something that I found interesting was the chopsticks that it uses. The tip is made in such a way that the noodles doesn't slip by having grooves at the front of the chopsticks.

Spiral groove

Kusabi serves tonkotsu-based ramen with shoyu, miso or fish oil. Its also serves dipped noodles (tsuke-men, or つけめん), which boasts a 1.5 times serving of noodles, as well as a series of ultra-spicy (Gekikara, or 激辛) noodles, with 3 levels of spiciness to choose from.

A key selling point of Kusabi that is different from other ramen places seems to be the use of fish powder (魚粉/魚節, or Gyofun). Made from fish flakes (e.g. bonito flakes) crushed into power form, here in Kusabi it is kneaded into the noodles and concocted into fragrant oil to add a seafood / fish flavour into the noodles. Especially for the noodles, the taste that is kneaded into it is supposed to seep out and enrich the taste of the soup, creating a different taste as you progress in your ramen. It is the only place in Singapore that offers this type of noodles now, but in Japan it seems that several other ramen shops use this technique too.

I tried the first item on the menu, the Marutoku Shoyu Tonkotsu Ramen ($19), which is actually a set with a bowl of ramen and an extra set of toppings.

The ramen is topped with a generous amount of shredded leak and chopping onions, as well as char siew, seaweed and bamboo shoot. The extra serving of toppings include 2 halves of aji-tama, 4 large pieces of char siew, seaweed and bamboo shoot.

The tonkotsu shoyu soup is well-made, with the right saltiness and flavour that I like. I slurped in a mouthful of noodles, and indeed there is a slight fish flavour that comes with it. As I progress through the ramen, I tried to sense if the taste of the soup changed ... but I guess my tongue is not sensitive enough!!

I tried its gyoza ($6) too. It was large and juicy with a lot of fillings. Not bad.

All in all I had a good experience at Kusabi and would like to go back again to try the other flavours and some of its signature side dishes such as the Pork-wrapped Rice Ball and the Nita-rice ball. Its a store worth trying, and next time I'm in Central, there is another choice that I can choose from in addition Santouka and Marutama.

View Ramen Walker's Ramen Map in a larger map

Ramen Data - Kusabi @ Central at Clarke Quay
Address: 6 Eu Tong Seng Street, #01-68/69, The Central @ Clarke Quay
Types: Tonkotsu
Price: S$13.5 - S$19
Rating: 8/10

Ramen Walker Feature @ WAttention

Not sure if some of my readers have already caught it....

Ramen Walker has done a ramen feature for the latest edition of the free magazine WAttention, which was released today!

　On one of the racks at JTB

The 4th item on the front page, "Slurping Life" :)

WAttention, a word made from combining "Wa" (= 和, meaning things that are Japanese) and "Attention", is a free magazine that talks about Japanese culture and traditions to the Singapore audience. I was fortunate enough to be contacted by WAttention a few months ago to have me as the guest writer for a feature of 13 ramen places in Singapore. The shops selected by WAttention covers most of the prominent ramen places in town.

Featuring places such as Shinchan, Keisuke, Tampopo, etc

As it is a good opportunity to share with more people about ramen, I took it up, ate my way through many ramen places, and recently completed the feature!

There are limited spaces that I could write for each shop so the description may not be that detailed, but it was fun finding out about the ramen store, speaking to some of the owners, and penning down my observations. For example, I managed to speak to Mr Tajima, the owner of Menya Shinchan, that I wrote about in a previous blog entry, and Mr Tsutsumi, the franchise manager for Sanomaru, who shared with me his challenge during the set-up stage. These encounters would not have been possible if not for this opportunity.

Anyway, an interesting assignment that helped me discover more interesting facts about the Singapore ramen scene. And it is exciting to see it coming out in hardcopy too!

Will continue to slurp away this delicious delicacy of Japan.

Last but not least....

Grab one copy of WAttention!!

2010 1H Unofficial Ramen Ranking

Time flies and June has come to an end...

... and its time to release the results of the unofficial ramen ranking, chosen by all of you ramen fans in Singapore out there, as at 1H 2010!

The top 3 ramen places in Singapore by popular voting are:

1) Marutama Ramen

2) Ippudo & Santouka

3) Nanttsutei

(ref: results for Q1)

Marutama is still holding on the 1st position after another 3 months. However, while they led by a large margin in the Q1 results, the gap between Ippudo and Santouka is closing quick.

Miharu has dropped out of the top 3, and replacing it is the fast-rising Ippudo, that jumped to share the 2nd spot with Santouka.

Another ramen chain that saw a sharp increase in votes is the newly-opened Nanttsutei, at No. 3. I guess it is pretty accurate as I always see a long queue when I go Parco Marina Bay.

Its a close battle for the top 3 spots, and I'm very interested to find out who will emerge No.1 at the next quarter.

There are also new entrants to the market such as Sanomaru and Kusabi too. Will they create ripples in this ranking?!?!

Looking forward to the results 3 months later!