Yoshimaru Ramen Bar

Well, I had considered starting a food blog a while back, but as usual I got sidetracked by other stuff, liky my tumblr account, and all the rest of the world out there. But Saturday was a special day, made so much more special by my friends from church. :)

Today was my first time back in church after two very very hectic weekends, and a few of us decided to go out for dinner. So delphink, j, jx and me decided to go to East Coast Park for dinner and stumbled upon this Japanese restaurant: Yoshimaru Ramen Bar. I really enjoyed the food, and the company and decided that I would do my first little food review :)

Place: Yoshimaru Ramen Bar at East Coast Park
Specialty: Traditional Hakata Ramen

It was threatening to rain and the claypot rice restaurant that we wanted to try had a waiting list of about half an hour or more, so we just trooped to the ramen bar next door. We managed to score seats for four at the bar.

Looking at the menu, I decided to go for the ramen bar’s speciality, the Traditional Hakata Ramen ($11), which was the ramen topped with chashu pork, soft boiled eggs, cloud-eared mushrooms and spring onions. They had different variations of the basis ramen that one could try, like the Shabu Shabu Beef Ramen ($14), Toasted Garlic Ramen ($13 – which I was quite interested in) and Chanpon Seafood Ramen ($13). They also had a DIY option, to which you can add your choice of ingredients onto a basic bowl of ramen with chashu.

So the waiter took our orders and served us our choice of drink as well as a funny bowl filled with sesame seeds and a pounder. We were quite confused about the bowl cause we didn’t know what it was for. The waiter told us that we should grind the sesame seeds and add it into the ramen. It was quite a fun experience for us to try out which was the correct way to ground the seeds.

When our ramen arrived, I was first captivated by the soft boiled eggs. The egg yolk looked so good, it wasn’t fully cooked and it looked like it was done just right. The egg was soft boiled to perfection! Not only was the egg yolk a tad runny, a thin layer of egg white just around the yolk was just as runny. It was so so good that it deserves two photos. :)

When I eat ramen, what usually makes or breaks the ramen is the taste of the soup, and this soup was awesome. It wasn’t too salty, neither was it bland. The creamy stock was sweetened by the many hours of boiling pork bones. I’m not too much of a carbohydrates girl, but the thin thin noodles were perfect to my taste buds. They didn’t steal the limelight away from the flavorful soup, but complemented it with a slight chewiness that comes from noodles cooked just right.

The slices of pork, or chashu was simply “melt in your mouth” kind of goodness. I really loved the texture of the portion that was given to me. The meat was not overcooked, unlike the many tough, dry and overcooked pieces of chashu I’ve eaten from other ramen places, and was made more yummy by the layers of fat on it. The size of the pieces were quite substantial as well. However, I doubt that every one would get this portion of the meat.

Delphink choose to take the combo meal ($17.90), Traditional Hakata Ramen with mini Unagi Don came with pickles and salad or something? The rice was quite soft, and was tasty when dressed with the teriyaki sauce from the unagi. The unagi was really delicious, except that it was hard to cut through the skin. We eventually gave most of the don to the boys because we were so full from the ramen.

The ramen was really satisfying and would fill up a hungry person. It was a really reasonable price to pay for such an enjoyable meal (oh did I mention a 10% discount for Citibank card members?). It was awesome til the very last drop and I can’t wait to bring my boy to try it soon. :)

Til next time…

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