Q Go Ramen

Q Go Ramen @ 1443 Broadway near Granville

You thought Vancouver already had enough ramen places? Well apparently people in high places won't be satisfied until there's a ramen joint on EVERY BLOCK of downtown Vancouver, because just a few months after a ramen place opened up at Granville and Cambie, which itself came not long after two new ramen joints opened up on Robson near Denman, a new ramen joint perplexingly called Q Go just opened up at Broadway near Granville three weeks ago on August 23.

It's a veritable ramen invasion. I'm pleased enough to be able to sample different ramen. But something that has begun to nag me in the back of my mind is that, although they are all somewhat different, they aren't THAT different. I can't envision myself eating ramen more than once, maybe twice, a month. Frankly, I'd much rather see a new Chinese restaurant specializing in some unknown type of ethnic cuisine open up than yet another ramen joint. I think we have enough now.

I'm sure I must not be the only one to have wondered what the bizarre naming of Q Go Ramen is about. I asked the waitress out of curiosity. I appear to have caught her off guard with my complicated English question. I felt like I was asking her to calculate the square root of pi or something. Anyway the message got through finally, and she didn't know, so she said she'd ask for me. I fully expected her to ignore the question and would have been fine if she had. But a few minutes later, when I'd almost forgotten about it, out she came to my table with a laptop open to a page, presumably the restaurant's home page, explaining the provenance of the name. Wow. Such graciousness, to actually bring out a laptop to show me. Only in a Japanese restaurant.

The little blurb said something about a Japanese soldier in China during W.W. II having sought refuge in someone's home and learned a recipe from the homeowner's grandmother, and this recipe having been named "95" ("kyuu go" in Japanese, hence Q Go) because of its royal connotation to honor the grandmother or something. I didn't quite understand, but it actually doesn't matter. I mainly just wanted to confirm that they didn't just choose a random number for the name and it didn't actually have any meaning. I hate it when Vietnamese restaurants are named 99 Pho or whatever, just choosing some random number like that. I like how ramen restaurants always have some deeper meaning to their names. I particularly liked the naming of Santoka Ramen, which is named after one of my favorite poets.

Credit must go to ramen joints for their incongruously and consistently stylish and pleasingly individualized interior design. You would expect a cheap dump for a place with only five noodle items on the menu aimed at the lunch crowd, but not so. The interior of Q Go is just as cute, clever and cosy as every other ramen place I've visited in Vancouver. The trendy, hip Japanese izakayas and the more plebian and workaday ramen joints both exhibit an extremely keen sense for how to design their respectively specialized spaces in a way that suits the nature of the food - ramen as a quick in-and-out stop where you feel comfortable and relaxed, the izakaya an intimate and personal space that envelops you with its organic design. They use a variety of different materials effectively in the trim, flooring, furnishings, etc. Notably at Q Go most of the furnishings have a wood-grain surface.

The decoration that jumps out at you at Q Go is the strips of wood on the wall with Japanese text written across them. They're not translated. Usually I feel in the dark when I go to Chinese restaurants and I'm surrounded by untranslated Chinese text, but for once I feel powerful knowing what it says unlike everybody else. LOL! What it says is:

The original ramen restaurant was Rai Rai Ken, which opened its doors in 1910 in Asakusa Park in Tokyo.

Mild tonkotsu (pork belly and bone) and shio (salt) soup

Full-bodied shoyu (soy sauce) soup and expertly crafted noodles

Rich miso soup and tender thick noodles

Q Go Ramen opened in 2010 in Vancouver

Anyway, about the food now.

The menu is not big. Everything fits onto one page side. Don't expect 100+ items at a ramen joint. Ramen joints do ramen, and that's it. And don't ask for take-out! LOL! It just isn't done, for some reason. They have a very peculiar but very particular set of standards to which they adhere rigorously, thought the logic might not be quite clear.

Q Go Ramen has three main ramen types plus a few sides, and that's it. End of story. Simple and to the point. This place is not innovating in any regard. It follows the template to a T. If you've been to the other ramen joints in Vancouver, you know what to expect here: reliably good ramen, the typical side dish offerings, good decor, hyper-polite cute Japanese waitresses, and that's it.

The menu is very succinct and well laid out, explaining everything very clearly on a single page side, and even managing to include photos and descriptions to boot.

As far as the ramen itself, this place is not as experimental as Motomachi on Denman. They stick to the three traditional broths of miso, shoyu and shio, and that's it. They follow the recent trend of charging for $.50 additional toppings like corn, chives and bamboo shoots, as if the ramen weren't costing enough already!

For my appetizer, I ordered the takoyaki. I went to the bathroom after ordering, and they had this cute noren in front of the bathroom door.

Only in a ramen joint, LOL. Not even a minute after I exited the bathroom and sat back down in my seat, the takoyaki were brought out. I was very happy with the speedy service, though not surprised.

They were hot and fresh and tasted excellent, with mayo sauce drizzled artfully on top, big bold pieces of bonito flakes dancing as they're wont when heated, and a sprinkling of finely shredded nori. Exquisite.

For some reason I appear to have misread the menu and thought it was only $2.00 for four takoyaki and thought, hey, that's a pretty good deal. When I got the bill, I realized it was actually $3.75. Entirely my fault. They're very good, but I do think they're a little overpriced. Tip and tax included, the bill wound up being $15, which feels like WAY too much for a quick noodle lunch.

As for the ramen, since this was my first time here, I started with the miso to see how they handled it. It seems like a good idea to order miso first to see how it compares with other places. That's what I always do.

The ramen prices range from $7.50 for shio and shoyu to $7.95 for miso. Not a particularly good deal, but average for ramen joints. They really push the upper limit as much as they can. I think an equitable price for a bowl of this stuff would be $4.99, as it's priced back in Japan. This isn't some high-end bistro food! It's stuff construction workers eat on lunch break. One trend I don't like in Vancouver ramen joints is how they're trying to turn the image of ramen into some fancy exotic dish so that they can charge a higher price for it. Pretty soon you're going to start finding ramen joints pushing $10 for a bowl of ramen! Oh wait, Motomachi already does that.

Q Go's miso ramen was quite good. I actually immediately preferred it to some of the other miso ramens I've tasted at places like Menya. I'd even say it's a little more refined than the miso at Kintaro, not that Kintaro's ramen is known for being refined. The broth wasn't particularly thick but had a very potent tonkotsu miso taste, and the temperature of the broth was just right and somehow miraculously remained so throughout the entire duration of the meal. The noodles, meanwhile, were excellent, firm but tender. They're just like I remembered the noodles in Japan at ramen stands. There's an amazing amount of calculation in these bowls of ramen. Oh, and I almost forgot the pork. The pieces of pork were wonderful. They were sliced very thin, and came apart with the slightest pressure, and were soft and tender - so unlike the horrible, hard, thick slabs they give you at Benkei.

I'll have to sample their shio and shoyu before rendering a verdict, but so far I'm fairly pleased with their offerings. The only downside is the lack of variety of types of ramen, the fact that they charge for toppings (they're not the only ones) and the fact that the ramen is a little pricey. But the miso ramen was actually good enough that I would visit again to try their other types of ramen.