Mutekiya @ Ikebukuro
Ikebukuro is one of the biggest and busiest area in Tokyo. For Ramen lovers like you, here is a good news! There are so many good ramen shops and also small china town area there. As a first step, I decided to visit the popular ramen shop called “Mutekiya”. The shop is located about 10 minutes from JR Ikebukuro station.
As you know, Ramen is fast food so you don’t need to worry about queuing for long hours. It usually won’t take long time. My case, I waited around 20 minutes (and leave the shop within 15 minutes!).
The characteristic of their ramen is that they boil high quality pork bone for long hours and take good care of removing scum many times until it becomes emulsified. What is more, they strain the soup for two times with using fine mesh cloth. Since the pork broth is so fresh, the soup doesn’t smell strong but has sophisticated, sweet and rich flavor.
I wanted to try their fish oil soup as well. So, I ordered the Honmaru-Black (950JPY). This ramen has black color soup and has thick and heavy texture from fish based oil. The flavor was what I expected and beyond!!! The chopped onion was a big surprise and went really well with the soup. YUM!
What I liked this ramen shop was that you can also order and add more toppings to create your own ramen. There are 10 choices; seasoned egg, thick simmered pork, stir-fried 5 vegetables, Bamboo shoot, Fried garlic, Boiled rape blossom, lightly burned thinly sliced Japanese spring onion, lightly burned Kujo spring onion, Nori seaweed and unprocessed nori seaweed. I ordered the stir-fried 5 vegetables. Technically, this toppings came before my ramen so I ate some of them as an appetizer.
They have various tsukemen (=dipping ramen) menus and also their original menus like crab brain miso, spicy miso, Spicy mabo tofu, mixed ramen etc. Please try them out! (I will definitely visit again and try another one next time.)
