Ramen, with reverence Forget those salty packets, Cho Ichi Ramen offers bowls of slurpable goodness By: Alison Gillmor Posted: 7:00 PM CDT Wednesday, Aug. 1, 2018 Last Modified: 8:08 AM CDT Thursday, Aug. 2, 2018

Opinion

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This article was published 31/07/2018 (2242 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

For decades, most North America ramen — if you could even call it that — came in crinkly little packages or Styrofoam cups.

A favourite food of university students, cash-strapped and blithely unperturbed about their sodium intake, it offered a fast, cheap hit of salty flavour and curly noodled carbs, all ready in under three minutes.

In Japan, proper ramen is anything but instant, and its long-simmered subtleties are treated with reverence.

As the devotion to real ramen spreads across the globe, the newest addition to Winnipeg’s growing soup scene is Cho Ichi Ramen.

With a properly serious approach to broth and noodles, the Fort Garry venue’s results are nothing like those student memories.

The Cho Ichi menu begins with a choice of two basic foundations for your bowl, a 12-hour pork broth or a six-hour chicken broth.

Made daily, they are both rich — buttery even. (They also developed a tell-tale gel — a sign of bone broth, properly cooked — when leftovers were taken home and refrigerated.)

The pork option is opaque, with just an edge of funkiness, the chicken broth slightly lighter, but still flavourful, and each is served up with strips of chashu pork belly and chunks of chicken that have the soft, edgeless quality imparted by the sous vide method.

Cho Ichi focuses on just one noodle option — thin and straight — but these fresh house-made wheat noodles have a satisfying, slurpable bounce.

Under the two main broth options, one can augment with three traditional variations, shoyu (soy sauce), shio (salt) or the cloudy, umami taste of miso.

The fourth possibility is the spicy garlic, which has some heat but maybe not enough for people who like firecracker levels. (More on that later).

There is also a vegetarian option, the broth delicate but deep in flavour and creamy in consistency, served with tofu.

Each option includes some add-ins — say, a seasoned egg, mushrooms and bamboo shoots, a sprinkling of green onions. Miso is complemented with fresh, sweet corn and black garlic.

You can also request extras. A note here: it seems fair to ask customers to pay for extra meat, for example, but it seems a little stingy to ration out chili oil paste as a $1 extra, rather than having it at the table, where diners could add it to their taste.

Extra noodles (at $2) come in a separate bowl, which might sound like a bad idea, but this method keeps them from soaking too long and getting soft — some ramen purists say your bowl needs to be consumed within four minutes of noodles hitting the hot broth.

Clearly, Cho Ichi’s kitchen is geared toward ramen, but there are several appetizers, including lovely tako yaki, little octopus balls that are delicately crisped outside, creamy inside and finished with bonita flakes — that wave, disconcertingly, in the dish’s heat — and a drizzle of Kewpie mayonnaise (A cult favourite in Japan, this rice-vinegar mayo offers “the unique taste of tenderness,” according to the company slogan).

There’s also calamari, made from squid tentacles rather than the more common rings, a smart choice, the tentacles being both more crisped-up and more tender.

Drinks include a selection of Japanese beers, sake served warm and lychee and yuzu soda, that last option having a fresh, not-too-sweet citrus taste.

There is just one dessert option — and it was sold out on one evening. Billed as green tea panna cotta, it has the lighter consistency of an Asian milk pudding. The flavours are intriguing, but the texture felt off, relying too much on gelatin rather than cream for thickness.

Cho Ichi offers sit-down service, efficient and fairly brisk, and the room is good-looking — bright and open with industrial touches and shots of colour.

You’ll pay a premium for the styling — there are less pricey, less trendy options for noodle soup if you head down south Pembina — but there’s something to be said for a hot bowl of soup in a cool setting.

alison.gillmor@freepress.mb.ca

Alison Gillmor
Writer

Studying at the University of Winnipeg and later Toronto’s York University, Alison Gillmor planned to become an art historian. She ended up catching the journalism bug when she started as visual arts reviewer at the Winnipeg Free Press in 1992.

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