The State of Ramen in Chicagoland

An attempt at taxonomy

Freshman year of college (20+ years ago…), I made an off-hand comment to some dorm mates—who ate a lot of instant ramen like so many college students—that if someone made a shop with “fresh” ramen, they’d do well. They weren’t really aware that ramen could come in a form other than instant, and you can’t blame them since we didn’t have ramen restaurants in most of the US at that time. My prediction might have been the best one I’ve made in my life. You can now get passable ramen in basically every American city above a certain size.

Chicago and its suburbs have plenty of good to excellent ramen. I’ll go through the categories of ramen places that exist here and what some of my favorites are, but before that, I need to talk a bit about what ramen is.

Ramen is a Chinese-Japanese dish

The first bowl of ramen was made a little over 100 years ago in Yokohama, the port city next to Tokyo with the largest Chinatown in Japan. There’s some dispute over what Chinese noodle dish ramen comes from. The word ramen appears to have come from the northern Chinese noodle lamian (拉麺), but it also seems like the closest relatives of ramen are from southern China. No one, though, disputes that ramen’s origin is some Chinese noodle dish¹.

So ramen is decidedly not a traditional Japanese dish like soba or udon, which have been around for many centuries. But over the past 100 years, ramen has become wildly popular everywhere in Japan, with many, many local variations around the country, and it’s hard to talk about food in Japan without mentioning ramen at this point. In a lot of ways, ramen is to Japan what pizza is to the US.

Two things can be true here. Without the Chinese community in Japan, we wouldn’t have ramen. And without Japanese cooks and Japanese eaters, we also wouldn’t have ramen as we know it now.

And similarly, it’s totally valid for non-Japanese cooks to develop ramen in their own ways. All I ask is 2 things. It should taste good, and it should taste somewhat like other versions of ramen.

Ramen map

Here is a Google Maps list of places I know of and can recommend². If I were a Chicago Tribune food critic, I would do a more thorough job and even rank places, but I don’t get paid to do this. There’s some details in the map that I don’t go into in this post.

Suburban Japanese ramen

Did you know that there’s a suburb of Chicago that has public schools with Japanese immersion programs? Even if you’ve lived in the Chicago area, you might not be aware that there’s a sizable Japanese population in the northwest suburbs. There are lots of Japanese companies with regional offices (and even their American headquarters) near O’Hare Airport, so a lot of the employees decide to live around there. A big chunk of them are Japanese citizens who are likely going back to Japan after a few years living in the US.

All this is to say that there’s a lot of demand in this area for faithful representations of ramen in Japan.

This is a good thing and a bad thing. You basically have a high floor (you get ramen that can plausibly pass for ramen in Japan) and a low ceiling (you won’t get much innovation in terms of style or ingredients). It really depends on what you’re looking for.

Shio ramen at Santouka, with toroniku (literally “fatty meat”, in this case pork cheek) on the side

There are lots of different styles of ramen represented, though. If you want fatty tonkotsu soup, go to Santouka in the Mitsuwa food court. If you want miso ramen, go to Misoya. If you want tsukemen, where you dip your noodles in the sauce that comes separately³, go to Chicago Ramen. Chicago Ramen even opened an “Annex” that serves Jiro-style ramen, which is notorious for being big and greasy.

Northwest suburbs is where the highest concentration of good, “authentic” ramen is in the area⁴.

Takeya/Wasabi/Menya Goku

For my money, the 3 best ramen restaurants inside the city of Chicago are owned by the same people. Takeya in West Loop⁵, Wasabi in Bucktown, and Menya Goku in Lincoln Square/North Center have similar but slightly different menus. Wasabi in particular has the biggest space and serves a lot more small plates. The ramen is always excellent.

There’s Japanese involvement in these restaurants, but they are willing to try more different things because of where they are located. You can even find vegan ramen, which I don’t expect to see much of in Japan—I haven’t tried it myself but have heard good things about the vegan tonkotsu ramen at Menya Goku.

Non-Japanese ramen

This is where there’s a wide variation in style and quality. Some places aim to imitate Japanese ramen, and others go in a more obviously “fusion” direction.

The most promising one is Akahoshi Ramen, which will open this fall in Logan Square. This is a restaurant from Ramen_Lord, who has been making ramen and posting on Reddit for years. It seems he will focus on Sapporo-style miso ramen, which makes a lot of sense because Hokkaido (where Sapporo is the capital) is the cold, Midwest-like farmland of Japan.

Tonkotsu shio ramen at Kyu Ramen

Kyu Ramen is a relatively new restaurant in River North that attempts to be like a Japanese ramen place. But it is actually a Taiwanese chain, which is why it annoyed the hell out of me when Eater kept talking about it as a Japanese chain.

Nothing particularly wrong with their food—my parents visiting from Memphis were perfectly satisfied with the ramen. Corn in something other than Sapporo-style miso ramen is unusual, but it’s fine. There’s little things about the decor that would tip off most Japanese people that it’s a slightly-off imitation of how Japanese restaurants look. I think it mostly underscores how hard it is to judge how “authentic” a dish is.

Ramen-San is part of the huge Lettuce Entertain You group of restaurants. Similar to their sister restaurant Sushi-San, their sound track is old school hip-hop, making it obvious that they aren’t exactly going for a Japanese feel. Where Sushi-San is excellent all around—it’s our favorite sushi place that doesn’t automatically exceed $100 per head—Ramen-San is a bit spotty. We’ve learned to mostly avoid their traditional offerings and enjoy their non-traditional dishes like kimchi & fried chicken ramen.

Their special ramen tends to be interesting as well. We recently had their Tokushima ramen, which involved marinated egg yolk and hot & sweet bacon as toppings.

Gyukotsu ramen

An interesting new trend in Chicago is the presence of 2 gyukotsu (cattle bone) ramen places that popped up last year: Monster Ramen in Logan Square and Gyuro Ramen in West Loop. This is in contrast to tonkotsu⁶ (pig bone) ramen, which is common enough, and others that use chicken bone broth. I wasn’t aware of this until I read about these places, but gyukotsu ramen is a thing in Tottori, in western Japan⁷.

I haven’t been able to try either place, but this seems like an exciting development that is specific to Chicago.

What I’m listening to now

Listen to the first song and guess where you think the music is from.

My first guess would definitely be somewhere in Africa.

This is actually music of an indigenous group in Taiwan called the Bunun. Their language is part of the Austronesian family, which makes it related to languages in Oceania (Maori in New Zealand, Fijian, Hawaiian, etc.)⁸ and not to Chinese.

Now that I know that, it does remind me of some a cappella music that I heard in Fiji.

The really shocking one is the 8th track, Pasibutbut, which sounds like a contemporary classical piece more than anything.

There’s a really great blog post that adds some context to this recording.

1. And Japanese people are aware of this. In summer, a lot of ramen places in Japan serve hiyashi-chuka, which is basically ramen salad. Hiyashi means “chilled”, and chuka means “Chinese”, as in Chinese noodles.

2. It would be nice to embed this map on this page, but I couldn’t figure it out.

3. This has 2 advantages.

1. You can adjust the amount of seasoning you get.

2. Noodles don’t get bloated from absorbing the soup.

The Japanese care a lot about the 2nd one. At ramen places, most of them would eat quickly and leave and wouldn’t really consider drinking or having long chats with friends.

4. I can think of places that are analogous to this in the Bay Area and SoCal.

5. I’m seeing that Takeya is temporarily closed at the moment…

6. PSA: tonkotsu and tonkatsu, while looking almost identical in English and often confused with each other, are 2 different things. ton is a Japanese pronunciation for 豚 (pig). kotsu is a Japanese pronunciation of 骨 (bone). katsu is a shortened form of katsuretsu, meaning cutlet—basically a piece of thin, fried meat.

7. I’m again talking about how hard it is to know what “authentic” ramen is.

8. And in Madagascar. The Austronesian migration has to be one of the greatest human achievements.