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

Kagetsu Arashi らあめん花月嵐

One of the bigger ramen chains, Kagetsu Arashi stretches not only all over Japan, but even to Taiwan, where a location exists at 華納威秀. This place offers a variety of ramen, and usually it feels quite gimmicky more than anything else. It’s not a lot of substance, just a lot of flair, if you know what I mean.

As you can see, plenty of condiments offered to help customize the taste of your ramen.

On a rather calm Sunday evening in Shinjuku, the ramen finally arrives only after a few minutes. Just looking at the bowl, nothing really stands out here. All the oil bits made the soup a bit too fatty for my taste, and the noodles were pretty average actually. The best thing about this bowl was the pork, which was pretty much the saving grace for this place.

It’s certainly done well for itself over the years, with shops ALL OVER Japan, so it must be doing something right. They'll have some new creative type of ramen like once a month, which again seem more like a ploy than anything. This is one ramen shop I would avoid if you want to have a taste of a truly amazing bowl of ramen. It’s very much all sizzle and very little steak. While you might not have to stand in line for an hour to enjoy the ramen here, the saying “the best thing comes to those who wait” really fits here.

Location: Everywhere (just kidding, look at website for locations)
Hours: Varies
Website: http://www.kagetsu.co.jp/index.html
Order system: Machine
Available in English? Maybe