Friday, November 26, 2010

NYC Ramen/Burger Tour 2010 - pt 2 Kambi

After wandering downtown for a while (in the rain, on Thanksgiving) I made my way back to the East Village for Kambi, apparently from the same owners as Minca around the corner. Being a holiday, I managed to just get in before they were closing (last order!).


Had their "Basic Spicy Ramen" which looks like tonkotsu broth with spicy miso or kochhu jang. There were some pan-fried bean sprouts on top, along with the menma, some wood-ear mushroom and nori. The charsiu was very tender, and they blowtorched it a bit before serving so it had some nice char-flavour to it. But the real star was the broth: so smooth and well-balanced it tasted creamy. Any more fat and it would have been greasy, but as served it was just perfect. Too bad the noodles were run-of-the-mill packages. Stiff with no chewiness, they were fortunately not bad enough to ruin the excellent broth. I kind of feel like the differences in price from ramen-ya to ramen-ya are artibrary: $11 got me just the bowl here, no sides.

If there is time this weekend, I will try their sister restaurant Minca.

After filling my belly (and closing the restaurant) headed back to the Village to hear Tom Harrell at the Vanguard. What a sound! But the rest of the band was not to my liking, just personal taste I guess. When we got home we tried listening to that band's latest album, but it was the same: not to my liking.

No comments:

Post a Comment