My spouse and I enjoyed an early lunch at Ippudo West Side
on a Monday morning in late May 2016. Ippudo West Side is located on West 51st
Street, between 8th and 9th Avenues, in the Midtown West/Theatre
District neighborhood of Manhattan. Ippudo West Side is open for lunch and
dinner daily, beginning at 11:00 am. The restaurant does not accept
reservations, and your entire party must be present in order for the host to
seat you. When we arrived a few minutes before opening time, a waiting line of
about eight people had already formed at the door; within 15 minutes of the
restaurant opening, all of the tables and all of the seats at the ramen bar
were occupied, so this is clearly a popular spot and you should be prepared to
wait for a seat. (On a positive note, the turnover rate/time for lunch is
high/quick; it did not take anyone more than an hour to eat his/her appetizers
and ramen.) The capacity of the restaurant holds about 75 people at a time.
Ippudo originated in Japan in 1985. Its name means "first
wind" or “one of a kind” because when the company was founded, ramen was
not a popular/profitable industry, and the founder intended to "blow wind
and revolutionize the era". In 2008, the first overseas Ippudo restaurant
opened in the East Village of NY; then in 2013, the Midtown West location opened.
Today, Ippudo has nearly 70 restaurants worldwide; besides Japan and the United
States, branches are located in Singapore, Hong Kong, and London.
Ippudo Westside occupies a large space, despite its sub-street-level
location. (The bar area has windows, so the restaurant is not completely
underground.) You must descend three or four concrete steps from the sidewalk
to enter the restaurant, so it may be difficult for the mobility-impaired. “Noren”, short linen curtains inked with
Japanese symbols, greet you at the doorway. A teak bar is located near the
front door, with restrooms positioned around the corner. When you approach the
host stand, you can request either bar/counter or table/dining room seating.
The 20-foot long ramen bar (with a narrow walkway for servers between the two
sides) allows you a glimpse into the bustling kitchen. The dining room offers
tables in many sizes/configurations.
When guests enter the restaurant to be seated, the whole staff yells a Japanese welcome; all
the staff joins in this traditional honorific shouting of “irasshaimase”. The wait
staff continue to shout expressions as they exit the kitchen area to deliver
food, but we are not sure what they were saying!
Ippudo’s Tonkotsu broth, a pork-bone soup that the
restaurant makes from scratch, takes two days to prepare because it is boiled
for 26 hours. The West Side location supplies the soup and noodles for the East
Village restaurant. To
start, we shared the yamitsuki goma kyuri (Japanese cucumber slices sprinkled
with sesame-oil sauce) and the Hirata steamed pork buns (which include pork
slices, spicy sauce, mayonnaise, and lettuce). Both appetizers were delicious –
we loved the unique cucumber dish; however, truthfully, we think that David
Chang’s pork buns are even better than Ippudos. As our entrees, we ordered two different
kinds of ramen: tori-shio (clear chicken-pork broth, with noodles, pork, onion,
bamboo shoots, and chili pepper, topped with a soft-boiled egg for $2 extra)
and the shiromaru Hakata classic (Tonkotsu pork soup, with noodles, pork,
mushrooms, bamboo shoots, scallions, and pickled ginger, topped with an egg for
another $2). We recommend trying the Tonkotsu broth
over the clear broth; it was more savory and flavorful, worthy of its long
preparation time. If you finish your noodles but still have enough broth left,
you can request “kae-dama” from your server, who will give you an extra serving
of noodles; our server offered this without our even asking, but we were full
at that point. No one suggested dessert, so we assumed that the restaurant does
offer any (or perhaps no one eats dessert at lunchtime?). From what we read
online, the dinner menu is more extensive than the lunch menu, with more
appetizer options, but for first-time visitors like us, it was probably better
to visit at lunchtime and have a more limited menu. Despite the large crowds
waiting for seats, our server was patient and polite. We had some difficulty
getting the slippery noodles from our bowls and onto the soup spoons using the
slick chopsticks, but that only made us eat more slowly and savor our food. As
we glanced around the ramen bar, other patrons seemed to use a multitude of
techniques to get the food from their bowls into their mouths, which made for
an interesting sight!
We
would be happy to visit Ippudo again in the future, either at the West Side
location or at the property in the East Village.
