こうりゅう kohryu: koi pwned

by rameniac | 29 Aug 2007

Americans are a territorial bunch. We take islands in the South Pacific, fight wars over secession and oil. Lately, enterprising young thugs have been spray-painting the alleyway behind my house, not with the good kind of graffiti either - no beautiful hip-hop bombs here - but rather, simple, quick tags from the “I have a can of paint and this concrete ditch now belongs to my gang” school of artistry. This need to mark and claim turf like… well, I could make an analogy that’s probably best left out of a food review lead.

However, as a longtime L.A. resident, I’m sure I speak for many when I say there’s one corner of Southern California no militant Angeleno worth his green tea latte would ever come to blows over: Orange County. What goes on down there anyway? Fans of a certain stultifying TV show might think it’s all surf, sun, and sex, but my long-held conjecture has been that the OC is where nothing stays open past 9pm and where No Doubt live, along with half the Republicans in the state. You can see why I’m hard pressed to simply recognize the existence of the 714.

But in the interest of journalism, I knew I would eventually have to make it past Long Beach. After all, Orange County gave us Ed, Keizo, and an inexplicably high concentration of Japanese restaurants in Fountain Valley and Costa Mesa which, at the very least, warrant further investigation.

And so it was that I spent a recent Sunday afternoon in search of ramen in Orange County and shops with names like Kairakutei and Gomen and Kohryu, an alternate reality to the Daikokuyas and Chabuyas at the forefront of my consciousness. When I finally googlemapped my way to one of them, to “Chinese Restaurant Kohryu” to be precise, we’d already looped around several thousand tract homes and burned up a quarter tank of gas. Eventually we found the place, tucked away in a Manhasset-style mini-mall across from the whitest looking authentic yakiniku restaurant in the world (um, you can’t take the OC out of, well, the OC). Word on the slurp going in was that Kohryu used to be good until a recent change in ownership brought things down a notch.

My friend and I took a seat at the counter, directly in front of Ahyoomi, Kohryu’s comely manager, who apparently spends most of her time totalling checks for diners by hand with a pen and white out tape. “What do you think of Shin-sen-gumi Hakata Ramen? Because I think we have the best ramen around,” she flatly stated. “And have you ever had tomato ramen in Osaka?”

I confessed I hadn’t.

“See. And you say you know about ramen!” she chided. And I let her slide, because quite frankly, Kohryu’s “KOI ramen”, a potent blend of shoyu-tonkotsu soup and ribbon-like yellow egg noodles, far surpassed my modest expectations for well, Orange County noodling.

The word “koi,” as far as i can tell, means love, and whatever the restaurant’s silly menu item names (there’s also a shacho miso ramen - “shacho” as in “company president?”), it’s great stuff - serious ramen for serious slurpers, chock full of awareness, allusion, and earnest effort in every bowl. A welcome film of oil glosses over the soup and the marinated egg is soft boiled, with a golden yolk as close to proper hanjuku as one is likely to find outside of Japan. Though not as thick or rich as HALU’s comparable ie-kei ramen, KOI’s flavor is helped to the next level by a generous dollop of fried green onions, negi which impart a fragrance akin to the world-class chukasoba of Kiraku in Shibuya.

If anything, my sole quibble lay with the noodles. They’re hearty and appropriate with just the right amount of chew, but their slightly flattened shape recalled linguini just a bit too much for comfort. It’s a minor complaint, and new ownership notwithstanding, whoever devised this ramen recipe certainly did their homework.

You can tell when an assari-kei ramen shop puts a lot of effort into their fare. Kohryu use different types of noodles for different types of soup. My friend prefers shio ramen, and the bowl he ordered featured thinner, paler strands closer to the Hakodate tradition, a perfect fit. The shio soup wasn’t bad at all, and the fried rice exuded pork flavor and the very essence of a hot wok. Kohryu’s handmade gyoza, thin and crescent-shaped, are a bit vegetable-heavy and could definitely use some work, but they’re no deal breaker, when everything else we had was so accomplished. Maybe Ahyoomi was right. Maybe this is “the best ramen around.” One could certainly make a case for it in the OC at least. Suddenly Orange County doesn’t seem so far away.