Kajiken
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. I was able to walk in about 30 minutes before closing time and was seated without issue.
Ambiance & Service
The ambiance felt like any no-frill ramen shop in NYC. The service was very speedy considering they were trying to tidy and close the kitchen pretty soon. After I placed my order, the noodles came out in about 10 minutes.
Food
The Niku Miso ($17.50) came with noodles with slow cooked chashu, minced miso pork, menma, poached egg, chives, scallion, and nori. This vaguely reminds me of tsukemen except some of the sauce is already in the bowl itself. You simply just mix everything, and voila, you have your dry noodle mix. The noodles were bouncy, chewy, and meets my delightfulness factor. They reminded me much of EAK Ramen. The sauce was a nice balance of salty and pungent. You can tell the sauce had some oils in it that really accentuates some of the flavors of the pork. For the price, I thought it was a good value as well.
On the side, they offer some more optional ingredients to season your noodles, which included some powders, black pepper, salt, vinegar, and chili oil. I didn’t really use any of that because the noodle and miso pork sauce was quite fragrant already.
Final Verdict
For a no-frills close to Bryant Park ramen place, Kajiken was surprisingly pretty decent. With the plethora of ramen places in the city and the competition, this is one of those ramen restaurants that I hope continues to be less popular, so that it is easy to just walk in.
Yelp Jabs
The noodles were a little lacking in flavor, maybe I needed to mix better? I might go back and try the other noodle options.
Yes, you need to mix things well. The easiest way to do this for the elementary is to toss the noodles till you see a thickness of sauce on top. The first bite is guaranteed to have a lot of flavor.
We thought it would be dry because it didn’t have soup but it was not at all.
I thought it’d be similar to other mazemen-like restaurants, but it turned out this was actually quite pleasant. They gave more than enough minced meat with oil where it was just wet but not soupy.
Revisions
- Sep 10, 2024 - Initial revision.