Day 21: My Favourite Ramen

Busy weekend once again, ok well not busy (I watched 3 films on Saturday), but I did go to another city so I couldn't post this on time. But the upside is that I got to go to a different ramen restaurant, branch out and not hate eating ramen so much. YAY. I went to Shizuoka city, which is also the name of the prefecture. I used to spend a lot of time in the city before and using a ramen app I found the highest ranked ramen shop. Of course I went there a lot and so i felt that it was time to introduce you to it. It is one of my favourite ramen restaurants. Actually I have just decided, yes, yes it is my favourite.

So similar... and yet so different. No, not really very different at all, just similar.

See that? It's delicious. The first time I came here I was blown away. It's called 和風 (Wa-fuu, Japanese style). The soup was a delicious, thick soup with a rich flavour and the noodles were good. But the real star of this was that amazing lump of meat you see up there. Forget melt in your mouth, this is melt outside of your mouth. This meat was so tender that it fell apart when I picked it up with the chopsticks and so delicious that I'm heavily salivating right now (Don't worry I'm not drooling, I learnt not to do that just when everybody else did, 16 right?).

Thats their menu up there, the first time I came it was pure guesswork.

I'm not sure if you can tell from the picture but cleanliness isn't their biggest priority here, everything has a fine layer of grease and most of the glasses had bits of dirt left on them. But who wants cleanliness in a restaurant? Thats not important right? However it can be forgiven because, as I said before, this was crazy delicious, oh and because its a tiny restaurant that only ever has 1 worker, there are 2 employees in total and it seats 5 people. They have 2 chairs outside for people to wait for a free seat. Thats right outside the restaurant can sit 40% as much as the restaurant itself can.

This restaurant is like 80% kitchen

This is literally the whole restaurant, the guy cooks it right in front of you and when you leave you hand him your dishes. This is a very Japanese experience. It is also a great example of how you shouldn't judge a book by its cover, some of the best food I have had in Japan was in this kind of tiny independent restaurant. I once had the best beef I ever tasted cooked by an ex boxer in his restaurant that sat 6 people (It was considerably cleaner than this place). I can now say I have had beef with a boxer!

Once again I was joined by friends (Want friends? Eat the same food everyday for a month, thats how i got them). I was eager to show off my favourite ramen place, unfortunately I forgot that one of them was gluten intolerant so she had to have a bowl of rice with spring onion and kimchi, the fermented spicy cabbage (It really does taste better than it sounds). Oops, thats some good friending right there! And Tommy, my American friend who found out that flipping the V is rude in the UK, thinks it's hilarious and now likes to do it in all photos, like this one.

That is the sneaky chef sneaking in in the background. You sneaky chef you!

That smile isn't a "HAHA I'm totally insulting you right now look at my fingers, this isn't insulting in my country" smile, no no that is a "This ramen was just crazy delicious" smile (I hope). It really is some of the best ramen I have had and actually if i can have it again I think I can make it through the final 3rd of my month. Only 9 bowls to go!

Now to write my next post immediately after posting this.