Popular for a century-plus, ramen now constitutes a competitive realm. Kaze Ramen is a worthy contender.
The claws are out.
On social media, at Yelp, they’re swapping insults, hurling barbs.
About what?
Noodle soup.
Not all noodle soups, of course, but ramen. Not the instant kind that’s been mass-marketed since 1958, but the rich, hearty, once-humble dish devised by immigrant Chinese cooks in early 20th-century Japan, where it was first called shina soba or “Chinese noodles.” A staple for a century, it’s now enjoying intensely ardent fandom in the West, where aficionados argue hair-splittingly about broth density, noodle circumference, and which style (Tokyo, Sapporo, Hakodate, Asahikawa, Kumamoto, Wakayama, Kitakata, et al.) is the ultimate best.
One of the newest noodleries up for scrutiny is Kaze Ramen. Open since August with its dining room painted a haunting, taunting yellow-green that would be the exact hue, if such hipster-bait existed, of wasabi ice cream, it poises at the northernmost edge of Downtown Berkeley as if straining to reach the Gourmet Ghetto. Its relatively minimalistic menu reveals that its owners know what ramen fans want. And its design—all artful sharp edges and clatter-enhancing hard surfaces, from the wooden floor and tokonoma wall niches to the wooden tables and chairs and heavy black dishware to the rustic wooden bench spanning the entire south wall—was clearly calculated with an eye toward quickly becoming crowded with the exact kind of customer who craves crowds.
Which it has. On an ordinary weekday night, it’s packed—mainly with sleek-haired young people speaking everything from Orange County–accented English to Japanese to Mandarin Chinese.
Table after table looks nearly identical: big black ceramic bowls containing, in various states of depletion, a virtually identical assemblage: chewy, squiggly, yellowish, and slightly-narrower-than-standard wheat noodles basking in ivory-white boiled-pork-bone tonkotsu broth, crowned with segregated scatterings of shredded vegetables and bean sprouts, along with a tasty, pasty-yolked ajitsuke soy-sauce-soft-boiled egg, a nori square, optional corn kernels, and/or dollops of pepper-paste “spice bomb”—and, in most cases (apart from the lone vegetarian ramen served here, whose broth is far thinner and can be flavored with the diner’s choice of shoyu, salt or Hokkaido-style miso)—meat. Batter-fried pork cutlet, tonkatsu, is popular here. So are wallet-sized slabs of chashu, teasingly sweet pork belly braised to the verge of shattering and as pale-pink as hope itself.
When ramen fans argue, they argue most intensely about broth. How much salt, shoyu, dashi and/or miso? Whose bones, which secret family recipe, which stock?
Spoiler alert: Kaze Ramen’s broth tastes like absolute transcendant nonvegetarian heaven. Every sloppy, singing slurp is the sacred concentrated chorus of every vegetable ever harvested in sunshine and every animal ever nurtured then sacrificed, aka slaughtered. A hot, thick mélange of blood and bone, it is an unapologetic paean to the ancient discipline of boiling. As close as anything in Japanese cuisine can be to creaminess, it slides down the throat radically slowly, for soup, mainlining minerals. Simple and rich, it’s simply rich enough to fortify the weak and possibly revive the dead.
Let the arguments ensue.
Because merely by wandering into Kaze Ramen, as into Oakland’s Ramen Shop, or any other such space, you’ve entered a den of sweatshirt-wearing connoisseurs. If you don’t know your kikurage from your kamaboko, you’re probably the outlier in an in-crowd.
How did this happen?
You probably grew up eating noodle soup. Who hasn’t? It’s one of the world’s most universal meals.
Yet we now occupy a time and place in which at least one kind of noodle soup, along with so much else that used to be folksy and plain, has become insiderish and almost academic.
An everything-but-the-kitchen-sink concoction about which for most of history and almost everywhere in the world it was virtually impossible to be fussy is now a delicacy about which scenesters compete fiercely to see who among them can be the fussiest.
But, hey. You could just take your chances. Like an ignorant rube inadvertently unearthing treasure, you could order Kaze Ramen’s justifiably popular black garlic ramen and admire its satisfying heft: Each bowl seems exactly, ingeniously stomach-sized. You could inhale the intoxicating perfume of its unctuous, inky, smoky-tasting polka-dots of mayu, fresh garlic cooked black in a pan then puréed with sesame oil.
You could sample some sides with this, such as sushi rolls or tangy, pleasantly crunchy gyoza.
You could sip hot or cold green tea. But, hey. That’s not the point.
Sooner or later, you’ll face the huge melamine spoon whose handle ingeniously hooks over the rim of your bowl, keeping it from sliding into the soup.
You could lift this spoon, its concave part almost palm-sized, and feel as if you are wielding not a table utensil but a garden tool.
It’s all part of a learning curve. A protocol exists for eating ramen. Regional styles apply, but bonding them all is a ramen etiquette, and this doesn’t just amount to “Dig in” because why then does this dish arrive with its components not mixed up, minestrone-style, but adjacent yet separate, like districts in a segregated town?
The egg and nori square just lie there, both too large to pop whole into the mouth. Most challenging of all is the chashu: Not chopped as meat is in other soups but reclining resplendently in slabs that, from a distance, resemble Modigliani nudes. Sure, they shatter easily. But should one shatter them? If so, how much and how and when?
In Japan, ramen is traditionally first sniffed then sipped straight from the bowl within split-seconds of being served. Then noodly mouthful by noodly mouthful, with the bowl watched closely all the while, it’s slurped loudly and quickly while still searingly hot. Chopsticks raise a few squiggly strands at a time, mega-spoon providing spill-proofing support below. Rich broth rides the noodles down the throat. The toppings provide occasional punctuation. The egg is not mashed into the dish but nibbled off the spoon. By this time, the nori has withered to walnut size and explodes between the teeth, yielding all the flavors of the seven seas. Like dessert, the chashu is left alone at the bottom of the bowl for maximum broth-absorption before being finally savored, shiny white fat rivulets and all.
And you could argue about all of this. Or you could just eat.
Kaze Ramen
1956 Shattuck Ave., Berkeley,
510-883-1388
Open daily 11 a.m.–10 p.m.
Entrées $8–$10. Cash & major credit cards. Wine & beer.
