Rai Rai Ken Review: Rai Rai Ken and human behavior
The other day my friend Jonathan said, “Your diet consists of burgers and desserts.” Not true. I also eat ramen. Just think about, what other food groups are there? And just because my breakfast consists of hersey’s kisses, hot chocolate, and an orange, it does not mean that I have a limited diet. Someone once said, “Live as though you will die tomorrow, learn as if you will live forever.” My diet simply reflects the first part of the quote. See, I am smrt. S-M-R-T. Now gimme a gold star. Oh yea so I went to Rai Rai Ken last week.
Rai Rai Ken is this little hole in the wall on tenth street in the East Village. If you are not on the lookout for it, you might miss it because you would be walking down tenth and be like, “Oh clothing store, regular apartment, regular apartment, clothing store, regular apartment, clothing store, oh wait, that is not a clothing store because people are slurping ramen in there.” The shop probably seats fifteen patrons at most and they have a straight forward menu featuring three different types of broth for the ramen: Shio, Shoyu, and Miso.
After reading about Setagaya ramen on Tina’s site, I finally learned that those thin slices of brown stuff is a root. Shinachiku root. See, that is why I love the internet, you can watch youtube videos on a blog and learn these things. They did not teach me anything remotely that cool at NYU. pssssh. College edumacation. More gold stars please.
My friend Patrick said the Shio ramen is kind of bland, and that he prefers Sapporo instead. That or he should have tried the miso or shoyu broth instead. I got the shoyu ramen and overall it was a good bowl of ramen. The broth was had a nice balance of flavor and was not overpowering in soy sauce flavor. Ingredients offered no inspiration although they were quite adequate and hit the spot. And the ramen was toothsome enough and cooked properly. I prefer the Menchanko Tei noodles slightly more, but not by much. Now I just have to revisit Setagaya and Momofuku again.
And after dinner we met up with more friends and talked and we eventually hit a topic that is especially fitting for a Friday (not because some topics are more fitting for a Monday but I figure more people go out on the weekends and none of my topics are ever that fitting for a food blog anyway so who cares). Basically what happened was that our group sat in Heartland Brewery on a six top, and adjacent to our six top sat a group of six girls. My group of friends happened to be a mixture of male and female. I said to my friend Ming, “$20 dollars to go talk to that girl over there at the six top.” “Uh huh, yea right. Lemme go over there and sarge her and give her negs.”
Now all of that would make no sense if you have never read The Game. And at this point I just want to mention that I probably used the words ‘sarge’ and ‘neg’ the wrong way, but that is ok because butchering language is what I do best.