I met up with Aarti late on a Saturday night and we thought that we'd have our pick of restaurants at 10:15pm. But of course, this is New York and it's one of the few cities where it's still hard to get a seat at a restaurant this late in the night. We thought we could easily get a table at Rosemary's but they quoted us a 45 min wait! Yeah - I'm not waiting until 11pm to eat dinner, so we tried out Jinya which was right next door and had a 2 top open at the bar. Perfect.
The menu here is a mix of ramen, yakitori (skewers) and then a bunch of Japanese small plates like seaweed salad, dumplings and some random sushi rolls. It was freezing outside, so I opted for the original ramen ($12) and Aarti got the vegetarian ramen ($11) - it was nice that they had a real vegetarian ramen option and not a fake option of pork ramen but just no pork in it (I'm looking at you Midtown Ippudo). We were both starving and opted for a bunch of veggie skewers: onion ($2), broccoli ($3), shiitake mushroom ($3), enoki mushroom ($3), and I got a chicken thigh skewer ($3). You'd think that grilling a bunch of veggies on a grill wouldn't take that long especially this late at night, but for some reason it took a while for our order to come out and our waiter was very apologetic about it. The veggies were all tasty and nicely seasoned but the portions were a bit small for the price. You can buy a whole head of broccoli for $2 at the grocery store while here they are charging you $3 for maybe 4 small bites of broccoli. Yes - I get that you are always paying a major mark up when you eat out but the discrepancy was pretty huge here. I did also thoroughly enjoy the chicken thigh skewer - very moist on the inside with a nice charcoal burn on the outside. Aarti mentioned that if she were to come back here again she would just order a bunch of skewers and other small plates....which leads us to the ramen. The original came with slices of pork, spinach, cabbage, scallion, and fried onion and I ordered an egg ($1 extra). The flavor was pretty decent although I would have liked to have had some seaweed and less fried onion. The egg comes on the side and is barely boiled, so they recommend you put it into the broth as soon as possible so that it cooks a bit more. That was a good recommendation because the yolk was indeed undercooked but in a good way. The pork broth was salty and flavorful but it was really cloudy and has this thickness to it that was kind of weird. The noodles were tender and totally acceptable but there didn't seem to be enough of it (or maybe there was too much broth?). Aarti mentioned that her veggie ramen was really lacking in flavor - which I am not surprised by because the centerpiece of any good ramen is usually the pork broth and a veggie broth is just never really the same no matter how hard you try. Plus it came with their totally weird bed of mixed greens on top. So bizarre and unnecessary.
All in all, it was totally a fine meal and it's totally worth a stop if you're in the 'hood and have a sudden craving, but Ippudo is still my go-to for addictive ramen in the city. I would go for the skewers but the problem is that the yakitori list isn't has comprehensive or adventurous as Takashi so you will have to order a few other small plates to really make it a full meal. Total bill: $24/pp with tax an tip
Photo Credit: Yelp
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