Ren's Ramen: Dude how was it?

CapSwell is taking a new direction in reviewing restaurants, I am going to take after the Baltimore Sun's "Food Critic" and just allow you, the loyal reader, to go and try it and post stuff to my blog. I will no longer be providing you with any insight about the places I eat, instead I will say "It's awesome totally awesome" and make you go to the eatery and allow you to post your observations as my reviews. Cheers!!

Just kidding.

Ren's Ramen was populated by a bunch of guys from the Japanese Embassy and an older japanese couple. I was greeted with a warm hello from the owner and seated by the window. The price is steep at $10 and thats without the extras like egg. The menu had miso, shoyu, tonshio pork, tonshio veggie. you can add extras like braised fatty pork, corn, butter, more sliced pork, egg, more bamboo, and seawood for extra form $.75 to $3.50. That can push your noodles upwards of $15. Ren's Ramen had a lunch special any bowl of ramen and fried rice for $13. They say on the menu they fly the ramen in from Sapporro. It was a nice small place in a Japanese Market.

Apparenlty, the DC Japanese commuity is all a buzz about it.

As for the taste, i havent had good ramen in forever so anything with a great broth, decent noodles and fatty pork is awesome. The broth was rich and porky, my braised pork pieces were a bit dry. The bean sprouts added a nice crunch. There were caramalized onions that sweetened they savory broth. I thought the bamboo was too earthy for me, i think a quick blanching would help to cut the earthiness, the noodles were fine. The bowl was huge in my opinion but my friend Bobby downed his whole bowl in like 6 spoon fulls. Frankly, i was glad not to have to drive to Rockville or Northern VA to find decent noodles.