Yeah, it was a pretty long night. After two izakayas, I just couldn’t resist the Shinagawa ramen street on the way back to the station. At least I was able to split a bowl with someone, which in theory helped with the calorie count. In practice, don’t be silly.
Tetsu is a really popular place. I mean, #14 nationally on ramendb as I write this. This is not the original – the end game for ramen these days is definitely to branch extensively – but it’s still ranked #100 nationally (and second of the Tetsu-related shops). You could argue that the rankings are too skewed in favor of heavy, porky, fish-mixed soups, or you could get on with getting people seated like this guy was. Respect. Didn’t blink when we asked to share a bowl.
It’s very open-air, which would suck when it’s so hot if they didn’t cover the openings with clear tarps and use some aircon. Setsuden, my ass. It’s a quite sort of place, and there were a lot of single diners.
But there’s no option smaller than this, a regular tsukemen. The noodles seem good without being aggressively chewy or wheat-y, but of course the soup is the real point.
And it’s a heck of a soup. Sometimes the fish-and-pork things can be tilted too much one way or the other. I think the common failings are insufficient fish or too much sugar, you may differ. This was very fishy, in an integrated way (note that it’s niboshi, little dried fish, instead of bonito-based soup) and not so thick as to be gross.
Solid egg. Rather, gel-like egg. Good.
One other gimmick is the soup re-heater. Once we read about thsi and saw someone else do it, we had to get one. Wouldn’t you? Your soup gets cold, you call for a heater, they bring over a pan and a spoon and one of these eggs,
And hell is unleashed in your bowl. I don’t know if it has a lot of effect, but it has a lot of style. And that’s what counts.
All that walking and fooding and hot-rocking is enough to tire anyone.
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