LA Daily News – February 18, 2016 – Ramen by Omae is a small restaurant in a largish mall with a big sense of history. You’ll find it crammed on the takeout menu, where the small selection of dishes is accompanied by tiny typeface descriptions: “The History of Ramen,” “The History of Tonkotsu Ramen,” “The History of Chicken Ramen” and “About Chef Omae.”
Food history is a funny thing. For the most part, no one really knows where any dish evolved; as a rule, the evolution is roundabout and vague. We know the Cobb salad was invented by Bob Cobb at The Brown Derby. But the modern Cobb bears only a passing resemblance to the Cobb served there. Ditto the Caesar salad, created by Caesar Cardini in Tijuana, but long since rejiggered into a far more ornate creation, with chicken and salmon and shrimp and kale and the like.
Just about everything else just kind of happened. But not, apparently, ramen.
We’re told it dates back to 1665, when Togukawa Mitsukumi invited a Chinese Confucian scholar to cook soup noodles for him. In 1910, a restaurant called Rai Rai Ken opened in Asakusa, serving ramen. Pork bone broth tonkotsu ramen was born at Ramen Ganso in Kurume City. And Chef Omae studied under Iron Chef Morimoto, cooked at Tableaux and Stella in Japan, and earned a Michelin star at what was first Morimoto XEX and then Omae XEX. At which point his bio starts talking about his “organic Italian style cuisine” — and I returned to my ramen, which is far more interesting.
Like a number of fabled Japanese restaurants, Ramen by Omae decided Los Angeles was the American destination of choice — and thank you for that. A Sherman Oaks mall is not where I’d have expected Omae to open; but then, the recent opening of Ramen Tatsunoya in Old Pasadena is a surprise as well. Here in Southern California, you no longer have to venture to Little Tokyo, Little Osaka or Gardena for your soup noodle fix. You can go just down the street.
Ramen by Omae is a modest storefront, with a handful of tables and a smattering of hard metal seats at a counter; this is not a place where you linger long over your bowl of goodness. But it is a restaurant that offers a larger menu than most.
Where many ramen places begin and end their menu with a bowl of soup with sundry fixin’s, Omae has seven basic ramens, 12 optional toppings, three fried rice options, a couple of curries, five non-soup bowls, 10 sushi rolls, and nine appetizers — all of which emerge from a very small kitchen, most of which is open to view from the counter.
The ramen is simply…wonderful, arguably as good as it gets. The pork tonkotsu broth is so thick, it seems to split the difference between liquid and solid. The chicken broth is a bit more liquid, good enough to replace Jewish chicken soup as my Universal Cure for Whatever Ails Me.
There’s a variation called chynpon that mixes pork broth with squid and shrimp, not an expected ramen at all. The “chicken salt ramen,” which is no saltier than the other ramens, comes topped with a hard-cooked egg — a tasty touch.
And truly, one can live on ramen alone. But then, you’d be missing the fine dumplings, steamed, boiled, fried and made with chicken wings. For those who find a bowl of ramen too demanding — it tends to raise a sweat — the fried rice is a welcome alternative.
Ditto bowls — like the salmon poke bowl, with avocado, crab and bright orange smelt eggs.
And then, there are the sushi rolls. They don’t have funny names — no Valley Girl Rolls or anything like that. But the salmon and ginger roll is a wonderful thing. The spicy California roll is just right. And though I’m not a fan of Dynamite Sauce (spicy mayo and sushi seem wrong together), what they create with the sauce in terms of sushi rolls is pretty good stuff.
Indeed, the question can be asked — is this Ramen by Omae, or Sushi Rolls by Omae? Oh my — it works both ways.