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.

Menya

A recent trend in Vancouver restaurants that has proven wildly successful is the ramen joint. Ramen, the traditional noodle of Japan, bears little resemblance in taste or form to the noodle staples of other nearby cultures. Vancouver has enough of a Japanese native population that it has seen one after another ramen joint appear in the last few years.

Unlike other types of food, for some reason there are no inauthentic ramen joints. By definition, if it's a ramen joint, it's authentic, at least here. Sushi joints here are a more uneven proposition, often being run by people with no interest in the craft. Ramen joints at least are a safe visit. You know that you'll be getting the real thing, created by someone who learned the craft in Japan.

I learned while on a brief visit to Tokyo many years ago that every ramen joint in Japan has their own secret recipe. I had a blast going around sampling all the different types of ramen. The recent proliferation of ramen joints in Vancouver allows you to have the authentic ramen-hopping experience minus the expensive plane ticket.

The kingpin of Vancouver ramen joints is Kintaro, at the corner of Denman and Robson. A veritable colony of ramen joints have mushroomed up in the immediate vicinity of Kintaro in the last few years. At present I count three others that started up over the last two years within a block of Kintaro (Motomachi, Benkei and Hokkaido, in that order), not to mention several Izakayas (Kingyo, Hapa, Guu, Gyoza King) and a hibachi joint (Zakkushi). A quick Google search reveals at least half a dozen here and there further on the outskirts of town. (There used to be one way out in Port Coquitlam, but I'm not sure it's still there after all these years.) I've never been so spoiled when it comes to Japanese food.

Menya at 491 West Broadway is one of the most recent entrants in the ramen race. Ramen tends to range between about $7 and $9, somewhat steep for a bowl of noodles. You can get a big bowl of pho at one of the dozens of pho joints throughout the city for a few bucks less, and it will be a considerably healthier meal. Ramen tends to be comparabily higher in sodium and fat.

Menya is not exempt from that gripe. I sampled their miso ramen today for lunch ($7.50), and it was typically competent in its production, with a few minus points. The pork on top was cold. It warmed up eventually when dunked in the broth, but still. Not enough picked bamboo shoots, too many sprouts - the same could be said of most of the ramen joints here. Broth good but not extraordinary. By no means a bad ramen. A very passable ramen. I prefer this tonkotsu miso ramen to that of Kintaro, famous for their big vats of boiling pork bone used to make the monstrously fatty dashi in their ramen. Kintaro comes in three fatty levels, and Menya miso ramen ranks about at the lower of the three. Imagine the heart-clogging monstrosity that is 'fat' Kintaro ramen.

Menya has three other varieties of ramen. The abbreviated selection is typical. Ramen joints focus on a few things, and do them well consistently.

They have a few curveballs on the menu - so-called "Jah-Jah-Men" and "Tan-Tan-Men", which are presumably mods of the mandarin dishes zha jiang mian and dan dan mian. I sampled the Jah-Jah-Men, and it was quite passable despite bearing little resemblance to the original recipe.

A perfunctory udon dish and soba dish top off the brief menu. The sides are mostly typical with the exception of karashi takana, a small bowl of picked collard-like greens spiced up with red pepper. It was delectable, a refreshing change from the usual sides, and one of the best dishes of bitter greens I've ever had. At $1.50, it was a reasonable way of rounding off the meal in Korean style with a few bites of sides between bites of main. Although in an ideal world every ramen joint would include a side or two alongside the ramen, considering such a hefty pricetag for a bowl of noodles.

Menya has proven reliably popular, as have every one of the ramen joints that have opened up in Kintaro's wake. Menya's small but craftily designed space seems filled every day around the lunch hour. The benches made of massive polished tree stumps are a nice touch that give the space a unique character. Each ramen joint is a pleasure to visit because they put so much thought into designing their tiny spaces in a way that cleverly convinces you that being packed elbow to elbow at the same table with perfect strangers is part of the package - key to authenticity - not an uncomfortable invasion of personal space.

In short, Menya is a very decent ramen joint that is as reliable as any of the others in town. Don't expect anything out of the ordinary, just competently made ramen, and you won't be disappointed.