Ramen Happiness: 肉ばか: Bowl #10

Day two of the first travel weekend found the husband and me on a train to Niigata City. It is really too bad that the city is a two hour train ride away or we would go there more often. This trip was not solely for the sake of Ramen, it was originally planned as a birthday gift for Husband as Niigata is home to the closest Mexican restaurant. Husband loves Mexican food, and it is probably the thing he misses most from home (besides our beloved Bulldog, Margo). Once we arrived in the city we attempted to orient ourselves with where the Mexican restaurant was, but ended up walking around for an hour in the wrong direction instead. Finally we located where we needed to go after going back to the station and starting over. The food was delicious, but much smaller than the platters of food you receive in America, or Mexico for that matter.

Not feeling completely full, and not wanting to waste an opportunity for a Ramen stamp, we headed out to a shop whose pictured bowl had us pretty excited. The walk was much longer walk than we anticipated, as the maps provided in the magazine are not equal to each other in scale, but we finally arrived at 肉ばか (Niku-baka) ready to try their showcased dish. The restaurant was busy and we had to wait a short while for a table. After ordering, Husband went to the bathroom and came back claiming that there were no less than 32 toilet paper rolls lining the wall of the men’s room. Intrigued, and since he forgot his phone to snap a picture, I went to investigate the women’s restroom where I found the same setup.

Back to the Ramen! Since one lunch had already been eaten, I wanted to avoid completely doing myself in and stuck with the standard Ramen. The bowl came out steaming, glistening with just enough fattiness, and topped with a nice array of extras. The first sample of the broth offered a hearty flavor with strong notes of pork and something else that couldn’t quite be placed. The rich, savory taste of the soup was followed by an almost sweet aftertaste. The noodles were alright; thin and squared off, but cooked well. Clearly the star of the dish was the chashu. The regular edition of肉ばか’s Ramen came with thin slices of fatty, juicy pork that tasted incredible when doused in the flavorful soup.

Husband knew he would be ordering the bowl from the magazine when he first saw it pictured on the page. Similar to the standard edition, it had the rich soup and thinner noodles, but lying in almost a complete circle around the perimeter of the bowl was a single, large slab of braised pork belly. From the moment the bowl hit the table, we knew that strip of meat was going to be quite a tasty treat. Husband had the same things to say about the rest of the dish, from the broth to the noodles, but the chashu was certainly the star of his second lunch. He was kind enough to let me sample a couple (small) bites and there was no denying the succulent, savory and slightly sweet pork belly was the reason this shop calls itself肉ばか, which roughly means “meat-fools”.

With two lunches in the bag, the long walk back to the station was not sounding very appealing. Instead, we hopped the bus back up the road and had time to peruse the multitude of shops in the area before our train departed. Swaying back and forth on the train lulled us into a food coma, giving both of us a nice rest after a day full of walking and eating. Even though I would have liked to have gotten more than just the one stamp in Niigata city, no way could our bodies have handled it. That one solitary stamp did bring us to ten out of thirty bowls or a whole one-third of the way through this challenge!