Totto Ramen Visited 5/14/2012 3 Forks

Totto Ramen 366 W 52nd St., (between 9th Ave & 8th Ave), New York, NY 10019

You'd think with my impending trip to Asia that I would lay off the Asian food, but instead I've had pho, sushi, bimbimbop, and dim sum in the past 4 days.  And now I've rounded off the food tour of Asia with a ramen dinner last night.  My good friend Neera was in town and she was coming from Long Island City, so I wanted to find a place that was easy to get to for all of us.  I ended up picking Totto Ramen since it was close to the E train and easy to get to for all of the dinner guests.

I knew that there would be a line but when I got there at 8:30pm, there was huge crowd that you could see a block away.  They have a self-sign in system and there were about 14 names ahead of us by then.  They also have a policy of only seating max 4 people at once.  There are only 2 tables that seat 4 people and the entire size of the rest of the restaurant is the size of a shoebox, so whatever your party size is, be prepared to wait but if you have 4 people be prepared to wait an especially long time.  In the end, we waited about an hour to get seated.  The inside of the restaurant transported me back to Japan with a very authentic look and feel and an all Japanese staff busily running around and yelling.


The menu has 6 different kinds of ramen, lots of topping options (corn, extra meat, scallion, bean sprout, avocado, egg, seaweed and spicy sesame oil),  and then there are a few specials on the board next to your table.  I chose the Totto Miso Ramen ($10.25) and the spicy tuna don ($6).  I clearly didn't need to order the tuna don but I am a sucker for anything that has raw fish on top of rice.  The tuna don was served with chopped tuna sashimi, onion, scallion, and flying fish roe in chefs special sauce served over rice, cucumber and kombu seaweed.  I didn't really see or taste the fish roe and there was this weird almost rice crispy like ingredient to the dish which definitely added an interesting texture and twist to the dish.  It was a bit hard to mix and eat the rice and sashimi together with chopsticks so that made the overall eating experience was a bit annoying but it was a nice way to start a meal.  Next came the ramen and it was steaming hot.  I literally felt like I was in a spa getting a steam facial.  The ramen was tender and I actually didn't think there was enough noodles in the bowl (although it could have been that I just ate really quickly).  The one thing that looked a bit different from other ramen I've had was this huge scoop of miso and ground pork on top of the noodles.  It kind of looked like pate and that was kind of weird to me and it didn't really taste like anything.  So I didn't really get the point of it.  There were two pieces of pork that looked a bit dry but upon biting into them were soft and tender and very tasty.  The rest of the bowl was served with a hardboiled egg, LOTS of scallion (almost too much), bean sprouts and onion.  While the ramen and broth were both good, I have to say that Ippudo's ramen is better.   It just didn't have the intense flavor and addictive nature of Ippudo's ramen (maybe that's actually better for my health?).  At Ippudo I practically lapped the broth but here, I just ate the noodles and didn't really touch the broth.  It could be because I had the tuna don before and wasn't as hungry.  I would come back here but definitely not if the wait is still an hour plus.  Total bill: $78 total for 4 people, includes 2 beers, 2 appetizers and 4 bowls of ramen.

Photo Credit: Yelp