Type: Restaurant
Rating: 1/5
Would not go back.
Sigh. There is nothing more puzzling or disappointing than a good place turned bad when a new location is introduced.
This review is for the SF Japantown location of Ramen Underground. It is an enormous shame to have to write this, but first thing’s first: the location in FiDi is a million times better, and it is incredibly weird to write that. There are few things that I consider better in FiDi, but please, for the love of all things delicious, please, do not go to the one in Japantown.
We should have been warned by the lack of people that were there. We originally wanted to go to Yamadaya Ramen, but the place was completely crowded. The same went for Sha La La, Suzu Noodle House, and almost every single noodle restaurant in Japantown. To be honest, I was rather surprised that there were so many people present on a cold Tuesday night. Must be something to do with being the day before New Years Eve. The fact of the matter was, almost every single restaurant was crowded beyond belief, and Ramen Underground had no wait time at all. Usually this is a good thing, but we decided to take our chances anyway.
We were seated right away in a corner booth with a strange-looking painting of a fish that looked like it was supposed to be in a children’s book. The place looked pretty similar to the location in the Financial District, but bigger. It was a very cozy seating, to be sure, but I always worry when I’m sat in the corner like that. It’s the easiest place to accidentally forget about someone. Or on-purpose forget about someone. Though the place wasn’t busy, we still had to wait while before someone took our order. This wasn’t too bad, as most people who don’t know what to order could take about that long. But of course, since we were in the corner, no one could have seen us looking ready to order. Anyway.
I don’t understand how it is possible that a place with the same owner could have food of such differing quality. The menu looked the same, but the one in FiDi doesn’t have kakuni. The addition of pork belly in the Japantown location should have been awesome. I definitely ordered it in my miso ramen and made sure to ask them to hold the green onions. The boyfriend ordered shoyu ramen with a boiled egg and kakuni as well. Thankfully, because my company was my boyfriend, I had a good chat – so good that I didn’t realize that half an hour had gone by before our food finally came in.
At first, I was happy to see that there was spinach and mushrooms included in the broth. Unfortunately, the food itself was just okay. The kakuni was mainly fat, with barely enough meat to be worth eating. The chashu was ridiculously rubbery, and I couldn’t chew through most of it. It was so tough that I’m pretty sure I could have bounced it off the walls. The noodles were all right; there was a very good quantity of them, but this was the first time I’ve ever disliked a bowl of ramen so much that I didn’t finish the ramen. There was nothing special at all about them, and I don’t think I would have been able to distinguish it from ramen made from a bag.
Boyfriend’s ramen was very clearly missing an egg. No one even came to check on us after we got our food, so we had no chance to say, “Hey, so, uh, we ordered an egg with this…?” which was obnoxious. In fact, they didn’t come back until the group next to us was ready to order. We had finished our meal for some time now. Usually I would raise my hand to flag someone down, but it was impossible to see where the waiter went. With a place that big, they should really get more wait staff. I wouldn’t give it another chance, though. They still charged us for the egg and didn’t give us a chance to say anything else as he just whipped off in a flash. Disgruntled, we paid in cash so we wouldn’t have to wait for him to get back to us, as that would have probably taken another five minutes before we could escape.
We couldn’t get out of there fast enough. Lesson has been learned: there are few places where the new locations are better than the original. If you want Ramen Underground, go to the one in the Financial District, where the service is quick and the food is a hundred times tastier. Which still doesn’t make any sense.
robbin rates things 