A food post now! Today we’re going to be talking about the ramen we sampled in Kyoto. We haven’t got a great deal of pictures, so you’ll have to trust us on this!

Ippudo

Upon arrival, we headed to a place called Ippudo. This place has a ton of internet recommendations and their specialty is tonkotsu broth, so we were eager to see what the fuss was all about. We went around 3pm on a weekday, so no wait time for us! They have a menu in English, which is very helpful, and we sampled their tantanmen style ramen (although I can’t remember what they call it…) It was nice but a little underwhelming. We’ve been spoilt by some of the other ramen dishes we’ve tried on our trip so far, especially the tantanmen in Manchinken, Nagoya. We couldn’t help but compare it to that and it just wasn’t up to scratch. We went past Ippudo a couple of times after this and there were always large queues outside, presumably because it has mentions in a lot of tourism guides. However it didn’t get another visit from us. There was nothing offensive about it, but nothing outstanding either.

Gogyo

We read about Gogyo online as a purveyor of the ‘burnt miso’ style ramen. From the outside you could see the flames licking the windows, as the chefs turned up the heat to make the burnt noodle dishes. We had to wait around 45 minutes one evening to get in and took a seat at the counter once our name was called.

Side note: it can be quite useful to learn how to write your name in katakana whilst in Japan. We’ve encountered a few restaurants now where we’ve had to sign up on a sheet, listing our name, number in party and whether we’d prefer counter or table. This isn’t everywhere by any means – most places you just grab a ticket and wait in a queue – but you never know, it may well come in handy.

Once inside Gogyo there was a table charge, which was 300 yen each. Sounds a little cheeky for a restaurant, but it’s not the first time it’s happened to us. At least with the table charge you generally get given a little side dish to soften the blow. In this case we had tofu and cabbage in a clear miso broth. It was pretty good, nothing to shout about.

We ordered the burnt miso ramen (above, black bowl), the burnt soy ramen (below, white bowl) and some gyoza on the side. Both dishes were super tasty – not like anything either of us had tried thus far. Perhaps because of the nature of the dish, both ramen bowls stayed piping hot for a reeeeeally long time. Sounds good, but took a long time to finish and we definitely both came away with burnt tongues. There were a lot of char marks on the toppings and in the broth itself, but the smokey flavours surprisingly didn’t overpower. We’d read online and had been told by pals that they’re rather an acquired taste (the shōyu more so). I didn’t think the flavour of either was too strong, but if I had to criticise I’d say they were a little oilier than we were perhaps used to. Either way, we really enjoyed both bowls.

Gogyo was a little more than we usually pay for ramen, but when you take our gyoza and the table charges into account, it wasn’t too bad at all. Worth a try, for sure! If we were still in the area, we’d definitely go back again. There are Gogyo restaurants in Tokyo and Nagoya as well, in case you aren’t venturing to Kyoto.

Taishoken

This one was unplanned, but I think the most delicious. One evening we headed down to Kyoto main station looking for a sushi place we’d seen online. Kyoto station is absolutely huge, by the way. Shinjuku is huge because of the giant maze of gates, shops and restaurants – Kyoto is mostly just giant open spaces. In our feeble attempt to get across to the other side of the station, we took several (!) escalators until we were suddenly at the 11th floor in a sky garden looking out onto the landscape below. This is a train station! Crazy. On our way back down we saw the famous Ramen Alley, a floor dedicated to many styles of ramen that we’d seen mentioned in guide books. Let’s have a look, we thought. I don’t know what we were expecting, but seeing queues outside of every single establishment certainly wasn’t it! We should know by now. Anything good tasting is worth standing in line for. We took a stroll around the winding paths, passing ramen after ramen, patron after patron. It wasn’t necessarily large, but it was jam packed! Then we saw on a hanging lantern one of the few hiragana phrases I can read… TSUKEMEN. It’s an essential one. Memorise it right now. You done? Good? Good.

Christopher and I love tsukemen. Since trying it in Tokyo we are constantly on the lookout for more tsukemen, hoping it will tide us over until we can get back to our favourites in Tokyo. The posters on the wall won us over – the sushi would have to wait. After tapping our choices on a screened vending machine and collecting our tickets, we joined the queue and waited our turn to enter Taishoken. We only waited around fifteen minutes to be lead to a table, but I would’ve waited longer for our tsukemen. It was a lovely rich broth, very similar to Fu-unji or Mutekiya, with delicious cold noodles to dip. For somewhere that had a comparatively small queue we were not disappointed in the slightest. After doing some research it turns out this shop actually hails from Ikebukuro, hence why the soup was so similar to our favourites in Tokyo. I’m very pleased we found it.

So as mentioned, not too many noodley filled pictures today, but hopefully our two pence might help you decide where to eat should you make the voyage to Kyoto. That is, if you trust me. Do you trust me?