This is a food update

sashagee wasn't feeling well on Tuesday, so she didn't go to the grocery store like she usually does. That means that my scavenged lunch, made of leftovers on Tuesday, didn't exist at all on Wednesday. We still had a few leftovers but I wanted to save them for sashagee and Laila, so I went to work with the idea that I'd find a restaurant nearby and go there. My first thought was go down and get avocado toast from the coffee bar in the building lobby, but the more I thought about it the less interested I was in that, so I looked online and found a restaurant nearby called Ēma (from אמא, "mother") and another restaurant called Aba (from אבא, "father"). Aba was only open for dinner but Ēma had a nice-looking falafel sandwich that I set my eyes on. Halfway there, though, I walked by the corner where the old Imperial Lamian dim sum place was before the Plague Years doomed it, and saw that it had been replaced by a ramen shop called Kyuramen 九湯ラーメン. I took a moment to deliberate, and then went inside.

There's only so many choices for me at a ramen restaurant, and here there were two. I got the chicken ramen:

The noodles were great and the broth was okay, which is my usual experience with Chicago ramen. Yesterday, though, I realized that it's probably because I usually get non-standard ramen. Ramen broth normally has pig bones and all kinds of stuff in it, and for obvious reasons I'm not going to eat that. When they make veggie or chicken ramen, I imagine they don't put in all the effort to make sure a broth that's as rich and tasty is included, especially when it's obviously that pork ramen is the showcase (as it is here) and other ramen is offered merely as a concession to people like me. All of that said, the chicken in the ramen was also good, very fatty as it should be and sliced like the chāshū is. Not bad.

I'm still a little leery though. They were advertising omurice, which I made at a party for people before the Plague Years, for twenty American dollars. This is a food that is made of 1) egg 2) rice and 3) sauce. There are instructions in that post I linked. Charging more for it than an omelet is straight-up thievery.

That said, when I looked up an article on Kyuramen I found this quote:

Lin has significant ambitions for the company and told reporters in 2020 that he hopes it will become the “Starbucks of ramen in the U.S.”

So, be warned.

The matcha pudding I got to-go and ate later was pretty good, though.