Ramen is HOT in Boston! (+1 bonus London Ramen)

I remember many years ago, it felt like there was a brand new Ramen shop opening up every month in New York city. Now NYC is filled with great Ramen shops that you could only once get a taste of in Japan. Fast forward to 2016 and Boston is finally starting to boom too!

I still have a handful of places I need to visit but here are some that I was able to go to eat and get a sketch of too:

•  Little Big Diner (1st Sketch) in Newton is probably one of the more newer places to open up and I had the Shio Chicken Ramen which was excellent! They had a number of nice looking appetizers and a nice selection of alcoholic drinks too. I'll be sure to be back!

• Yakitori Zai (Now Closed) - This place used to be a high end Yakitori restaurant that also served really nice Ramen just on the weekends. I heard that the reason they closed down was due to the neighbors complaining from the restaurants food venting. Bummer... 

• Snappy Ramen - They have stores named Snappy Sushi too and I've been to the one on Newbury Street as well as the one in Davis square. This sketch is from the Newbury one and it was my very first 'Lobster Ramen'! This Ramen was actually more of a novelty item and was fun sharing with friends. I thought their more standard ramen dishes offered at the Davis Square store was much better.

• Here's the Davis Square version of Snappy Ramen:

• Yume wo Katare  This place has been super popular ever since they opened up 3 1/2 years ago. known for their Jiro-kei style Ramen, the place usually has people waiting in line for hours to get in. I thought the taste was really good but portion wise, I couldn't even finish 1/3 of the ramen bowl since it was too big. I have numerous friends who swears by this ramen and their large portion so if you're super hungry, this is the place to go!

• Santouka Ramen This ramen shop originally from Hokkaido is probably one of my favorite places in Boston. I used to visit New Jersey to see my father quite often and used to always have a bowl of Santouka before returning to Boston. Well, now it's open in Harvard square and it's really good!

• Ganko Ramen This place in Brookline opened up about 8 months ago and really enjoyed the overall presentation of the place. The menu is simple ( I believe only 4 dishes and couple of drinks), the interiors simple and calming too. I really like this place.

• This last one's not from Boston but had it on my recent trip to London at Shoryu Ramen 
  It was Excellent!

(Added January 2017)
I've been to the one in NYC but this was the first time visiting Totto Ramen in Boston.
It was actually really good and for some reason crazy filling too.

I had this for lunch, and skipped dinner and wasn't even hungry the next morning too !

Japanse Ramen (noodle) restaurants in Boston

The past couple of years has been a nice influx of Ramen shops opening up in Boston.
I used to have to drive down to NYC or NJ to have nice bowl of Ramen so this is great!
Here are 3 places I was able to get a sketch of the past years.

Ganko Ramen
The newest place to recently open up in Coolidge corner.
A Sapporo style Ramen and really enjoyed their Shoyu flavor.



Santouka 
Here's one of my favorite Shio Ramen.
I used to have to drive down to NJ to get a bowl of this - now located in the Harvard area.
  

Yume wo Katare 
Great flavor. My only gripe - I wish their portions were much much smaller.
But then once again, their customer clientele is made up of heavy eaters so it's probably perfect for them!
 

Japanese Ramen noodle's in Boston @ Yume wo Katare (夢を語れ）

Our friend Masa told us about a grand opening of a Japanese noodle shop here in Boston and asked my wife and I if we wanted to go check it out. The store opened at 6 pm but we decided to go an hour later thinking there would be a lot of people and we could avoid the congestion.....
Well it turned out there were easily over 80+ people in front of us in line with outside temperatures in the 40's F!! It was freezing and way below the historic average for this time of the year!
Here's a sketch drawn outside in the dark with really cold fingers of us waiting inline looking inside the restaurant watching people eat noodles:



The name of the Ramen noodle restaurant's called "Yume wo Katare", roughly translated to "Tell your dream"/"What's your dream?" is a successful noodle shop in Kyoto Japan and decided to open up it's first overseas store here in Boston. Why Boston? well it seems they had many reasons but Boston is also the Sister city of Kyoto. The restaurant owners dream is also to have stores opened up in all 195 countries around the world by the year 2030 and Boston was the first overseas store - What a huge dream!

So 2 hours 20 minutes later, we finally made it into the restaurant and sat at the counter looking into the kitchen.



For a small restaurant (roughly 16 seats) there were lots of employees with lots of energy working here. It was quite impressive watching them prepare the dishes. The person on the left prepared tons of vegetables (cabbage + bean sprouts) and the person on the right continued to make broth/ soup. The person in the middle prepared the noodles (I believe he was the owner of the restaurant) and when it was ready, he would yell "Ninniku iremasuka?" (Translation: "Do you want Garlic in your noodles?")



Here's the sketch of the interior and the noodle dish we had. Great flavor! Crazy amounts of meat/ vegetables even for the small dish that we ordered. Our friend Masa had the large dish but completely finished it! He was so addicted to the noddle that he mentioned that he was going to try coming here at least once a week from now on. When leaving the restaurant we also got 1 banana each!



Here's a sketch of our friend Take-chan who also waited with us in line outside for an hour but had to go back to work. Well, I hope he get's to try out the great noodles one of these days in the near future and if you're ever in town, swing on by too.  You'll be in for pleasant surprise!

Yume Wo Katare
1925 Massachusetts Ave
Cambridge, MA 02140