Too Much to Swallow

Ebi Shio Ramen (Chron photo)

Like many starving students back in the day, I got through a few all-nighters with the aid of a hotplate and 25¢ packages of ramen.

It required a major psychological adjustment to pay $10-$15 for a ramen bowl when restaurants began offering them in the new century, but the quality of fresh noodles, freshness of ingredients, and complexity of the broths eventually won me over to the price differential. The fare that was being served in the restaurants was completely different from the packaged version.

However, I'm going to have to draw the line at paying $175 for a ramen dinner in San Francisco:

the ticket price at Noodle in a Haystack, opened by married couple Yoko and Clint Tan in San Francisco’s Richmond District in the spring, can seem shocking: $175 for a ramen tasting menu.

Not just ramen: chuka soba (wheat noodles)

The Chronicle's food critic effusively describes the uniqueness of each dish. (Note: I have italicized food-critic prose that I find particularly pretentious praiseworthy.)

...a deviled egg, made from the typical marinated egg you’d see floating in a bowl, repurposed as an hors d’oeuvre. Its yolk was whipped with Kewpie mayonnaise, concentrated fish powder and pickled daikon radish juice and topped with garnishes of fried chicken skin and boba-like marinated salmon roe. Like Willy Wonka’s three-course chewing gum, that single half of an egg seemed to contain a full narrative in itself.

That course has since been replaced with a coat button-sized brown butter financier topped with a fluffy dollop of creme fraiche whipped with smoked soy sauce. The morsel was scented behind the ears with dabs of garlic oil, and it was all finished with a briny plop of black caviar. It’s not so obvious an act of foreshadowing, but it got everyone at the counter cooing with pleasure.

The new menu has also leaned harder into the seasonal produce conventions of California cuisine. A delightful miniature ramen came disguised as a pomodoro pasta, complete with a potent Early Girl tomato jam, a kelp-tomato broth and even some burrata topped with chile crisp oil. The Tans also got on the corn train: For a scallop and sea urchin dish, they pureed Brentwood sweet corn and turned it into an airy, whipped version of corn potage, the French-influenced cream of corn soup that you can buy from vending machines on the streets of Tokyo.

From the description of the hours, knowledge, and skills that go into this dinner the price is merited, I suppose, if one subscribes to the labor theory of value.

Although it's not my cup of tea, things can't be that bad in the City dining scene if there are enough customers willing to fork over $175 for ramen, or $72 for fried rice.