If last year was the Year of the Chicken in St. Louis, 2016 may well prove to be the Year of the Ramen. Two restaurants featuring the noodles have opened in town, and I suspect more noodleology to come.
Now, I claim no long, nostalgic history with the cheapo ramen noodle packets. They arrived on the scene too late for my personal impoverished-student history or I'm sure I would, but tasting them as a full-grown adult, they always seemed rather brackish to me, no matter how much enhancement of leftover pork or mushrooms or shrimp I stirred into them. And according to ramen vets, the point of great ramen is the broth and the packets are a shameful thing to bear the noble name of ramen.
Nami Ramen is clearly set up to catch some of the Clayton lunch crowd, none of this closed Tuesday (or even Monday) sort of thing. Dinner, too, of course, and all deeply casual, some long tables, some seats at the bar, some seats at a counter in front of the west- and north-facing windows. Order and pay at the counter and your food is brought to you.
There are appetizers and salads, but relatively few of those flew out of the open kitchen. This may well be because the bowls of ramen are generous. I did try a bao, the fold-over steamed bun, available in four flavors. The braised pork belly with roasted pork belly, cucumbers and a bit of roasted tomato, plus the threads of green onion that are tucked into each one, was good, if a touch dry in the dough itself. Tiny julienne of pickled ginger sat out as part of the seasonings on the tables and counters; a bit of it made things nigh-perfect on the flavor balance.
Kale looks good in a salad, but it can be tedious to chew, leaving a diner resembling a Guernsey mulling over what to do after a nap. Here, it had been pretty well subdued, and waited with plenty of cherry tomatoes and edamame. Alas, it was awash in a sweet dressing which sloshed in the bottom of the bowl and took much of the fun out of things. But it's a main-dish-sized salad, suitable for lunch for folks who don't mind sugar in a salad dressing.
Jigoku ramen, "like a bonfire in your bowl", per the menu, sports what's described as a chili bomb. The noodles coming out of this kitchen are, to me, almost perfectly al dente, just chewy enough. Here they're topped with sprouts, and mixed with corn and minced onion, and a hard-cooked egg , which comes in all the ramen bowls. The whole thing topped with a small ladleful of minced pork and bits of red pepper in a hot oil. That's presumably the chili bomb. I admit I'm sort of a metalmouth. I thought this was delicious but it way wasn't the kind of heat I would have anticipated. I stirred things well, and found a good glow, maybe a 4 on a 1-to-10 scale, 10 being the hottest. It, particularly the broth, was quite tasty, and I'd happily eat it again.
The "robust tomato-flavored seafood broth" for the seafood ramen pulled an odd stunt in the bowl, though. The first spoonful was far from robust, but had enough oceanesque savor to cause a smile. All the succeeding ones, however, were wan, downright lackluster. Three large tempura shrimp crowned the bowl, but two were completely in the broth, entirely sogging up their crust. Some fine woodear mushrooms and a generous amount of crab meat joined the ramen noodles in the broth, but this bowl was all about the solids and not the liquid.
A note, by the way, about eating this. There is just no graceful way, by Western standards, to eat this. These are loooooong noodles, and the tradition is to slurp them. For some, this would, for example, completely rule it out as a first date setting. But don't you think kids would love it?
Not as cheap a bowl of ramen as it would be in a tired strip mall elsewhere around town – this is Clayton, after all, a block from the courthouse. But worth further exploration, to be sure.
Nami Ramen
46 N. Central Ave, Clayton
314-833-6264
Lunch and Dinner daily
Credit cards: Yes
Wheelchair access: Fair
Smoking: No
Entrees: $10-$17