Ramen Setagaya

by Celia Sin-Tien Cheng
July 27, 2007

SHIO RAMEN
141 1st Ave
(St Marks Pl & 9th St)
New York, NY 10003
212-529-2740

On a cold rainy day, though mid summer, I thought it would be perfect to have lunch at Setagaya — a nice hot bowl of ramen really warms me and fills me up. This was my third visit to this new ramen shop in the East Village since it opened last month.

Setagaya specializes in and exclusively serves shio ramen. (The four most common flavors of ramen are shoyu (soy sauce), shio (salt), tonkotsu (pork bone soup) and miso. Shio is a clear broth, and while it does have salt in its base, an outstanding shio broth must rely more on the complexity of its other flavors than the more distinctive flavors of miso, shoyu or tonkotsu. To do its shio justice, I think it best to quote from the back of Setagaya’s menu, which explains how the ramen broth is made: “Pork bone, chicken and chicken bone, Raus seaweed and Rishiri seaweed from Japan, dried mushroom, dried scallop, dried anchovy, garlic, ginger, cabbage, and red pepper are prepared separately and then combined together for our ramen soup.” The broth comes topped with dried scallop, which has been fried and ground into flakes, fresh julienned scallion, hotate oil also made from scallops and Aosha seaweed.

To simplify things, you only have the choice of shio ramen or tsukemen. Both are served with shio broth, but the shio ramen is traditional ramen in which all ingredients are served in one bowl, while tsukemen involves dipping the noodles into the broth as the two are served in separate bowls. Other side dishes are available, which are simply repeats of ingredients included in the shio ramen: cha-shu (roast pork), menma (bamboo shoots), and salt egg. Some rice dishes are offered as well, like oyakodon (egg and chicken over rice), and toridon (chicken over rice); also on the menu are appetizers like edamame, oshinko (Japanese pickles), and seaweed salad. All in all, the menu is really limited, as the true focus of the kitchen is on its signature ramen. Many items on the menu were whited out during the first week of business, which is a sign that they would be implemented over time. Some of these items are now served, but the menus have been reprinted, and, to my disappointment, they’ve removed gyoza altogether. How can a ramen shop not serve gyoza?! Let’s hope that’s just temporary.

The shio ramen is good: the flavors are rich even though the broth is clear. The salt egg is half of a pickled, hard-boiled egg with the yolk only slightly runny — the perfect consistency! The cha-shu is fatty, tender, juicy and stands up well on its own as a meat dish. The noodles are thin and have that perfect springy consistency. The menma, a staple in ramen, is nothing special to speak of. In addition, there are chopped onions floating in the broth. Watching the Japanese food show “Seventy-seven Best Ramen Restaurants in Tokyo” (which plays repeatedly on the large LCD screen in the restaurant) I learned that at the Setagaya ramen shops in Japan, you get an entire bowl of chopped onions to use as a condiment, so that you may add as much as you like. We don’t get that option here.

The tsukemen is also served with a shio broth, but the noodles are wider, like a much springier tagliatelle, and the cha-shu in the broth is sliced up, which dilutes the full-flavored, fat laced pieces of meat. There are chunks of dried scallop in the broth, which are missing from the ramen, giving it much stronger hints of seafood aroma. Unfortunately, the dish comes with no egg or menma, though you can order them as side dishes. Another problem with the tsukemen is that the noodles get cold quickly, as does the broth, so only a few minutes into my meal, I was sadly dipping cold noodles into lukewarm broth. Overall, I preferred the thickness of the noodles used in the tsukemen but the ramen was a better meal.

Service, on the other hand, was atrocious! On all three visits to Setagaya, I found the staff to be utterly clueless, unprofessional and downright dumb. The restaurant suffers from a total lack of management: it’s like the blind leading the blind. Besides the ramen chefs, who are busy cooking behind the counter, most of the servers are not Japanese, or knowledgeable about their product (or anything else, I imagine). There’s generally no line at lunch, but the restaurant doesn’t seat more than thirty, and a queue forms outside the store during dinner. When a line is this long, turnover is key, but the servers here are clearly incapable of managing the flow of customers. The staff is so inattentive, that on my second visit, we spent ten minutes trying to get the check from our waitress, even though we had been done with our meal longer than that and there was a long queue.

During my most recent visit, the waitress, while trying to pour broth for my tsukemen from a thermos, spattered broth into my eyes. In accordance with Murphy’s Law, I wasn’t wearing my glasses that day. The broth wasn’t piping hot, but this is not something I am typically thankful for. With the level of incompetence here, I couldn’t see the point in getting upset, but I do think that if the staff’s training does not improve, the restaurant is a lawsuit waiting to happen.

Since Chikubu closed I hadn’t had a favorite ramen in town, until now. Even though the management needs improvement, I like Setagaya for its overall authenticity. Just in case you are wondering how I feel about some other ramen joints in town, here’s the skinny:

Rairaiken — it takes talent to make food that has “No MSG” in it taste like it’s laden with MSG
Minca — good (but too rich for me!)
Sapporo — mediocre
Menkuitei — below mediocre
Menchanko-Tei — I prefer the menchanko to the ramen but overall the tonkotsu ramen is not bad

Speaking of ramen comparisons, I was reminded that I might need to venture outside of Manhattan if I really want to find the best. I’m finally going to try Ramen Santoka in Mitsuwa (Edgewater, NJ) next month, something I’ve been meaning to do for a couple of years now! Ramen Santoka is another famous Tokyo-based ramen shop, and my friends Sarah and Henry who also lived in Japan are fanatic about it, so I know it has to be delicious. I’ll keep you posted!

Also in East Village, Japanese, Noodles, Ramen