めんくい亭 menkui-tei: the times they aren't a changin'

by rameniac | 10 Nov 2008

So I’ve been away for a while. The truth is I’m lucky in that I have a job which allows me to travel. As a web developer, I can literally take my work with me wherever I go, so long as there’s an internet connection. But the downside to that is that sitting in front of a computer for eight or nine hours a day, no matter where you are, is incredibly taxing on the senses.  Come six pm, I’m usually too beat to stare at the screen further, never mind waxing philosophic about noodles in a far-flung corner of cyberspace.

These days, I’m sitting on a huge stockpile of notes and photos for a rather significant backlog of write-ups. From suppers in Seattle to Nagasaki-style noodles in Northern California, I’ve got work to do.

Last month, I finally made my way to New York City. It was one of those spur-of-the-moment, low-budget endeavors involving a red-eye flight and a friend with a spare bedroom, but I somehow manage to compile a quick list of the most prominent ramen shops to visit in betweent schleps to the Grand Central Oyster Bar and outings for the stuff one doesn’t normally encounter on the west coast: Belgian-style moules frites, New York pizza, boiled hot dogs off of proper Midtown carts.

Menkui-tei came up straightaway on my first pass through the East Village, the very day I landed in New York City. In a city of cutting edge, food-forward restaurants, the joint is a decidedly old school enterprise - a no-frills assari-kei ramen shop with an expansive, multi-soup menu, a Japanese beer girl poster tucked away in a corner of the room and a early-nineties vibe but for a coat of paint or two after who-knows-how-many years in business.

I was off to an inauspicious start. Ramen shops like these rarely make their noodles in-house.  JFC and Mutual Trading must ship nationwide, for lurking in my bowl of namesake Menkui Ramen” were the same generic, prepackaged strands you can find at any of the more careless ramen shops across the country– yellow eggy lines done to a reasonable degree of springiness but never quite coupling with the soup like properly sourced noodles should. New York water might be great for pizza dough, but apparently it’s no substitute for kansui.

Yet there were a few redeeming qualities to this bowl, which flaunted a light soy-sauce soup, with relatively sophisticated underpinnings – a sweet but not too sweet flavor, balanced if not particularly deep.  My friend ordered the tonkotsu ramen (a big no-no in multi-soup shops, for the most part). With a thin, soulless flavor, the pork bone soup proved little more than an afterthought on a none-too-specialized menu, but the toppings across the board were at least palatable – slabs of tough but well-marinated chashu with a fragrant aroma, bamboo on the finer side of fresh.

New York, I would soon learn, has ramen shops to rival - and one to surpass - the best in Los Angeles. There are even a few that could plausibly compete in Japan. Yet the one downside to a short stay in an unfamiliar city is that this rameniac will typically - almost compulsively - try to squeeze in as many establishments as possible. Menkui-tei’s fare was neither here nor there; it offers up a serviceable, even above-average couple of bowls for sure, but next time, I’ll probably just give it a pass.  Above-average doesn’t begin to cut it in the toughest restaurant climate in North America.