Food Fridays #10: Yushoken Ramen & Izakaya in Irvine, CA 🤘

Food Fridays #10

---

While looking for my next ramen joint to try in South Orange County I realized that I had already tried most of them! The remaining ramen places were mixed with sushi or just weren't authentic ramen shops. Luckily I found one more place nearby in Irvine, Yushoken ramen.

I arrived at around 6pm hoping to beat some of the Friday night crowds, I was wrong. You see this place is located across the street from UC Irvine and is one of the only shopping centers in the area, so it was packed. To make things worse some students tried to sneak in in front of me and about 10 other people who had put their names down on the list. As soon as the service person went to take the order I went inside and explained what they did. The manager thanked me and put them at the end of the line.

After waiting for about 20 minutes I was seated and ready to eat! Of course, you must always start what you hope to be a good dinner with an ice cold beer!

I looked over the menu and it seemed pretty straight forward, except the tonkotsu ramen had shoyu as well. This may not be odd to many ramen enthusiasts, but it was new to me. It seemed too good to pass up so I went for it and ordered the Tonkotsu Shoyu ramen with some extra chashu. One thing to note, you were able to choose from 3 types of noodles too! I went with my normal, thin and straight. You can also choose wavy or thick.

The service was fairly quick considering how busy they were, about 5 minutes from the time I ordered till it arrived.. When the ramen arrived I was pretty stoked. Oily, meaty and looking like a heart attack in a bowl, signs you know it's gonna taste good.

The first taste test is always the soup. I tried a bit and it tasted pretty normal for tonkostu base. Nothing stood out, which was fine. Then I dug in and everything changed. I have to say this was a pretty fantastic, well balanced ramen. The charshu was a bit thicker than normal and cooked just right. There was enough fat on it to make a difference in the taste. The nitamago was perfect, melty in the middle just like it should be.

Then came the shoyu, which was separate at the top of the bowl in the picture above the nitamago picture. Holy shit, mind blown! ⚡️🦄💥🌈 Seriously I was thinking, wtf is this and why have I never had it before? It was like umami, adding a whole other level to the dish. I seriously paused and smiled like I had just discovered a new treasure. I don't know exactly how to describe it, but it was pretty close to perfection. It was however missing one ingredient, garlic. Sorry, but unless you have fresh garlic you only make it to level 4 on the best ramen in the universe list. Regardless, this was the end result👇

Yushoken Ramen Ranking

• Soup - 🍜🍜🍜🍜🍜
• Men - 🍜🍜🍜🍜
• Chashu - 🍜🍜🍜🍜
• Nitamago - 🍜🍜🍜🍜
• Umami - 🍜🍜🍜🍜🍜

If you are in the Irvine area and are looking for a good ramen place, this is it. In fact I'm so sure you will like it that I will let you publicly shame me like The High Sparrow shamed Cersei, and make me do The Walk of Atonement, or you can just agree to disagree. See the link to the location below courtesy of @steemitworldmap, one of the best ideas to hit Steemit in a while.

!steemitworldmap 33.650775 lat -117.838865 long Yushoken Ramen 🍜🍜🍜🍜 A good Tonkotsu Shoe Ramen & Izakaya by @rt395 d3scr

I'll be heading back to Japan in a few weeks so Food Fridays are going to be kicked up a notch with some real ramen, hopefully some crazy dishes as well as osechi-ryori.

Thanks for reading!

---

I do weekly series' on Monday, Tuesday and Friday. Here are previous posts for those days.

Mineral Mondays - https://steemit.com/science/@rt395/mineral-mondays-15-some-of-the-rarest-gems-on-earth

Travel Tuesdays - https://steemit.com/japan/@rt395/travel-tuesdays-12-cafe-de-copain-ningen-kankei-cafe-pub-in-shibuya-tokyo

Food Fridays - https://steemit.com/food/@rt395/food-fridays-9-starbucks-zombie-frappuccino

As well as daily topics like crypto, Japan, music and more.

---

• Follow me for stories on Japan, Gems & Minerals, Crypto, DnB, Cali & living life!
• Follow my wonderful wife for her adventures! @tokyowomanslife

---

Our Steemit Blogger Central Discord community is here:

Discord:
https://discord.gg/e5XFZKa