Two of the city’s most resourceful hospitality empires recently opened restaurants in response to the persistent ramen craze that’s swept across the nation, beginning with David Chang’s Momofuku Noodle Bar in New York City a decade ago. The fact that it’s taken that long for the Melman family’s Ramen-San and Brendan Sodikoff’s High Five Ramen to open their doors hopefully says more about the value of patience than it does about hopping on the bandwagon. In the meantime, the often-invoked axiom that not one of Chicago’s newer bowls of ramen is better than those served by two Japanese-owned chains in the suburbs—Santouka and Ramen Misoya—has continued to hold.
Oh, but did you want ramen? There are seven varieties, plus an occasional special from a kitchen hidden from the dining room—the former Studio Paris space, thumping with 90s-era hip-hop. These are built upon pork-based tonkotsu broth or soy-spiked chicken broth (there’s also a shiitake-based broth for the vegetarians) and garnished with seaweed, fermented bamboo, scallions, and pickled ginger, plus various proteins, including the familiar chashu, in this case slabs of roasted pork belly, and hanjuku tamago, the molten soft-boiled eggs that are typically served warm in the soup—regrettably not the case at Ramen-San, where the eggs arrive chilled. Other, more unorthodox additions include kimchi and fried chicken in the tonkotsu broth and, in a black-garlic-dosed chicken broth, several slabs of smoked brisket from LEYE’s Bub City down the street.
High Five Ramen’s equally good noodles come from Sun as well, but Sodikoff and company went with a shorter, fatter temomi noodle that has an imperceptibly irregular cut and a larger surface area that allow the broth to better cling to it—particularly the extraordinary tonkotsu broth, which is employed in four versions including a superspiced, potentially dangerous “Kanabo” variety that deploys ground ichimi chile and sansho, a relative of the Sichuan peppercorn that produces a tingly, numbing effect. There’s also the signature High Five Ramen, which is plenty spicy in its own right, though also available with half the heat or none at all. It’s characterized by a viscosity and coloration that in the basement dim approaches something you might see if you were to peer over the crater edge of an active volcano.
It’s that kind of stripped-down focus that makes High Five Ramen the most convincing approximation of an actual ramen-ya the city has seen to date. Sodikoff came up in the LEYE organization, so it’s ironic that he’s serving the best bowls within the city limits while his former employer is still playing in the sand.
59 W. Hubbard 312-377-9950ramensan.com
High Five Ramen | $$
112 N. Green 312-754-0431facebook.com/Highfiveramen
