My partner on a late Saturday evening was planning to get some food with their friend, so that means I can venture out on my own. As people know from reading this site, I’m a ramen fiend. I love to try all sorts of ramen, and I never mind eating it by myself. This ramen location recently opened only a few weeks ago, and I definitely prefer early dinners. It’s located very close to the 7 train Court Sq stop, and is just around the corner from the Long Island City Trader Joe’s.

Kajiken is located a few streets south of Bryant Park. I originally was trying to do a walk into Tonchin, but they told me there was a 1-hour wait for a single bar seat solo. Irked, I walked towards Bryant Park, and I found that there’s this ramen place that was on my list to try. Interestingly enough, they have both soup-based ramen and dry ramen. Their dry ramen is like most other dry-noodle things where there is some oils and mixtures at the bottom of the bowl, and you simply can mix everything.

The Kyuramen restaurant chain has been slowly making its way throughout the greater NYC area. They just opened a location out in Long Island City which is not too far from where we live. This restaurant had construction signs early in the pandemic and just never opened until now. We thought we would be able to get seated right away on an early Sunday afternoon, but they checked us into Yelp and we had to wait around for about 15 minutes for a table of 2.

What is tsukemen (つけ麺; pronounced “skee-men”)? It’s basically thick udon served cold with a side of a thick soup/broth for dipping. In Los Angeles, I frequented a place in Sawtelle near the Westside called “Tsujita” that also specialized in something similar. Okiboru recently opened in Manhattan, and it’s famed for being on Michelin’s Bib Gourmand list in Atlanta. They do not take reservations, so when we arrived at this location at 5:15 PM on a Friday, the line outside was about 10 parties ranging from 2 to 6 people per group.

This ramen place is pretty close to where I work. It’s located on 48th and 6th ave and is very close to Rockafeller. There is no way you would know of this restaurant unless you were either intentionally looking for it, or if you saw the ground floor sign that indicated this was upstairs. I had some time during my lunch, and decided to take a quick spin to see how this was compared to other ramen spots.

I was supposed to meet my partner the next block at Casa Enrique, but for some reason they mistook a Japanese restaurant for a Mexican restaurant and ended up here. They found it weird that there were no lines, whereas I went to Casa Enrique and encountered a line. Because Casa Enrique doesn’t take walk-ins and the line was getting rather long, we decided to just eat here, and to my surprise, it was a good substitute.

Typically when we walk north on 6th ave towards Trader Joe’s for groceries, we stop by Cava across the street for a snack. We saw this seemingly new interesting restaurant opened with no one in it. The space is very bright, modern, and definitely has a Japanese cafe-chic vibe to it. This dry “ramen” place just opened along 6th Avenue between 20th and 21st Street. This is another one of those “pick X of this and Y of that” type of restaurant except the theme here is Japanese.

This ramen place is near NYU and Union Station, so it’s very accessible. The spicy miso ramen comes with ox bones and marrow broth, spicy miso garlic base, bean sprouts, roasted corn, toasted nori, naruto fishcake, soy braised beef, scallions, and thick wavy noodle. THe broth is super rich, far beyond what I was expecting. It’s not spicy per se, but the soup doesn’t go down super smooth for me.

This place has a pretty decent ambiance. The yuzu margarita was surprisingly pretty good. If you haven’t had yuzu before and like citrus, I recommend you get this if it’s available. I just checked their website’s drink menu, and it’s not on there. This drink wasn’t strong at all, and had a really really good before and after taste. I would drink this over any regular margarita any day.

I don’t know much about this ramen spot other than it was on Chef’s Table, and how it really touched a lot of people’s hearts. So my review will be almost based solely on the food itself. The pork musubi bites were surprisingly good. Each bite is packed full of flavor, although I am rather doubtful that it’s worth $5 a piece. The Japanese fried chicken were an interesting spin on karaage.