kinchans: location ain't everything

by rameniac | 03 Jan 2008

You know, it’s much easier to write a review for a bad ramen shop than a good one. With a good place, you want to do the ramen justice, to find that perfect word or turn of phrase to describe the mélange of flavors lurking in your bowl. The better the shop, the more clever the lead must be, the more acute one’s required journalistic insights. The sloth in me is thrilled, then, to be able to whip out this review of Kinchans on Sawtelle as though QWERTY keyboards were going out of style.

Sorry, Kin-chan (can I call you that, by the way?), but thoroughly average noodles invites thoroughly average similes. I wish that weren’t the case, but when the shoyu soup is opaque and murky not from a generous use of pork bones, but rather from inattentive boiling and a failure to strain out the scum, you know something’s amiss. Granted, Kinchans’ ramen is rather distinctive in its mediocrity, with a slightly beefiness from all the free-floating meat radicals; if only it didn’t taste like someone had dumped a can of Dinty Moore stew into the pot and used it as a lazy chef’s version of stock.

Kinchans gets some credit for its chashu at least; generous chunks of alarmingly pink pork that so desperately want to become buta kakuni and practically scream for a thorough braise and makeover. The noodles are passable and inoffensive, but only because they’re the same generic noodles everyone else sources.

Maybe I’m being a bit harsh, as I was in my overzealous castration of Ramen Nippon. But hey, it was one of my earliest reviews for this site, and they’re due for a reappraisal. If only Reseda weren’t so far away, and that I had any other possible reason to go there from time to time.

Kinchans, on the other hand, has no excuses. I’m guessing the ramen-loving community would just like to see the shop get its act together. I mean, there has to be a reason it’s usually overlooked, despite its location in one of the hippest strip malls on Sawtelle Boulevard, epicenter to all things giant, robotic and cool in L.A., right? People buzz about Ramen-Ya, Chabuya, and even Asahi Ramen all the time, but no one ever really talks about Kinchans.

To its credit, Kinchans has tsukemen on the menu, a rarity in LA and a definite must-try for anyone curious about one of Tokyo’s hottest ramen trends. Dipping ramen noodles in broth, soba-style, is all the rage these days. Alas, Kinchan effectively uses the same soup for both his regular shoyu ramen and for the tsukemen, which should ideally be more of an undrinkable concentrate. This would explain the beefiness of the regular shoyu broth; perhaps the chef is searching for a happy medium that he can use for both dishes, hoping diners won’t notice the difference. Perhaps he’s cutting corners, and perhaps he has to, as those same diners have largely been eating elsewhere.