The noodles are made by the respected Sun Noodle, which supplies customized formulations to ramen makers across the country from factories on both coasts and in Hawaii. Somehow, the flavor seems to escape with it, despite a healthy dose of ground pork. The chile-oil-slicked spicy miso, based on a combination of tonkotsu and chicken broth, has a wonderful toasty aroma that rises above the bowl. It’s a decently porky-tasting broth that worked best in a special featuring a generous scoop of sweet crabmeat, with some textural variety contributed by a dash of yellow corn.īut even Ramen-San’s most vigorous-appearing bowls lack backbone. Ramen-San’s tonkotsu broth is a bit better yet, appropriately milky, a bit lip-sticky with collagen, but only to the degree that leaves one wanting more. The basic shoyu ramen is better, a thin but discernibly chickeny soy-finished broth that’s hard to complain about, perhaps because it’s too difficult to remember. It’s as if Ramen-San is mollycoddling the flavor-fearing folk of River North. The inherent intensity of those ingredients does nothing to enhance what turns out to be one of the weakest bowls on the menu: egg, noodles, and brisket bobbing listlessly in a watery, tasteless broth that seemed to have arrived unseasoned-a blandness emblematic of a general timidity that inhabits these bowls. Other, more unorthodox additions include kimchi and fried chicken in the tonkotsu broth and, in a black-garlic-dosed chicken broth, several slabs of smoked brisket from LEYE’s Bub City down the street.
#Highfive ramen plus#
These are built upon pork-based tonkotsu broth or soy-spiked chicken broth (there’s also a shiitake-based broth for the vegetarians) and garnished with seaweed, fermented bamboo, scallions, and pickled ginger, plus various proteins, including the familiar chashu, in this case slabs of roasted pork belly, and hanjuku tamago, the molten soft-boiled eggs that are typically served warm in the soup-regrettably not the case at Ramen-San, where the eggs arrive chilled. Oh, but did you want ramen? There are seven varieties, plus an occasional special from a kitchen hidden from the dining room-the former Studio Paris space, thumping with 90s-era hip-hop. Tight little shrimp-and-pork wontons are armored with an umami force field of seafood-powered XO sauce. Spicy Sichuan chicken wings are steroid-size and glazed with a lacquer of sesame-studded candied spice.
Under the direction of chief Lettuce chef Doug Psaltis, some of Ramen-San’s dishes are quite good, like a pyramid of sesame- and togarashi-sprinkled cucumber slices dotted with blobs of sweet fresh uni, looking like something living in a tidal pool. While both Lettuce Entertain You (the Melmans) and Hogsalt Hospitality (Sodikoff) did their homework-sending research teams to Japan to study the masters-the former has stuck with this safer approach, offering a half-dozen appetizers, a trio of Changian meat-stuffed steamed buns, chicken wings, and salads, not to mention a half-dozen cocktails by Paul McGee and an impressive collection of Japanese whiskeys. I’ve long argued that this is because the new guys fail to commit completely to the concept, instead offering a range of supplementary dishes that have no business sitting beside a bowl of noodle soup. In the meantime, the often-invoked axiom that not one of Chicago’s newer bowls of ramen is better than those served by two Japanese-owned chains in the suburbs- Santouka and Ramen Misoya-has continued to hold. The fact that it’s taken that long for the Melman family’s Ramen-San and Brendan Sodikoff’s High Five Ramen to open their doors hopefully says more about the value of patience than it does about hopping on the bandwagon. Two of the city’s most resourceful hospitality empires recently opened restaurants in response to the persistent ramen craze that’s swept across the nation, beginning with David Chang’s Momofuku Noodle Bar in New York City a decade ago.
#Highfive ramen series#
Sommelier Series (paid sponsored content).
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