Kindenmaru らーめん金伝丸 おきやま

Planning is so important, and I learned my lesson the hard way when I decided to meet a friend for lunch without planning. I had planned to visit a ramen shop in Shibuya, but when I didn't have a backup plan, we had to settle for just any ramen shop in Shibuya.


Kindenmaru was in our sights, and from the pictures outside, it looked pretty good... so we gave it a chance.


Walking into the shop, we saw wooden crates of fresh noodles sitting there waiting to be cooked. This was another good sign. But little did we know what was coming.


I opted for the tokumaru (特丸) ramen. It's their "special", and it looked decent in the picture.


What came was a pretty average bowl of ramen. As you can see with the charshu, it was very lean, and not to my liking.


The tokumaru had two kinds of pork, the second kind was a bit better, but there was not much of this in the bowl.


The broth was fairly balanced, not too much fat, but the flavor was not very good. I couldn't tell whether it was tonkotsu, or shouyu, but whatever it was, it wasn't done very well.


And the tamago was cooked too long, the yolk being pretty hard and not liquidy at all.


Perhaps the most disappointing thing was the noodles. Seeing those fresh noodles in the crate, I expected at least the noodles to be decent. But it reminded me of instant ramen, and I might have had better with some of the instant ramen I've bought from a convenient store.



A very disappointing experience to say the least. If only I had a phone with internet access, I would have gone to my main source to find something in the area. I am not sure how this place stays in business, and it's rating in ramendb speaks for itself. There probably have something that is half decent, but with so many choices in Tokyo, I would skip this shop entirely.

City: Tokyo, Japan
Location: Shibuya, 3 minutes walk from the station
Hours: 10am - 7am
Website: No official website, http://ramendb.supleks.jp/s/7611.html
Ordering system: Machine
Available in English: Minimal