Sunday, January 22, 2012

Ramen King Keisuke Takeda's Ramen Restaurant in Singapore!

** Update ** We've made a second trip to Keisuke - check out our full thoughts on the Ramen King's other broths by following this link!

Continuing our Ramen exploration in Singapore, we turn our attention now to Keisuke Ramen over in Parco, Millenia Walk. This joint is TV Tokyo's 2011 "Ramen King" Keisuke Takeda's first venture here, and much has been said about his prawn-based soup stock (which takes a few hundred ama ebi, or sweet shrimp, to make).

Except that you can't have this prawn-based ramen any longer. Apparently the story goes that the locals "didn't know how to appreciate" the soup base - saying it was little different than our local prawn noodle - so the chef decided to just stop cooking & serving it. As the saying goes, "Pearls before Swine" :P


You can, however, still have a choice of tonkotsu, shoyu, shio, (spicy) miso ... and Crab Stock bases for your ramen. You can also choose how tasty you want your broth to be, how hard you want your noodles, and which toppings to exclude.


Gyoza (SGD5.00) was pretty par for the course. I'm not sure why I always tend to order gyoza with ramen - it's possibly because almost every ramen shop I've ever gone to also serves gyoza on the side. Or because, as a KK boy, it's very similar to one of our staple foods - the pot sticker a.k.a. Wo Tieh.


Anyways my Shoyu Ramen with ChaShu was très disappointing. The meat was a little dry and not anywhere near as flavorful and tender as most other competing shops, and the soup base was just overpoweringly salty. From the soy sauce. Yes yes, I know I did order soy sauce-based soup, but it's suppose to be the *base* and not the *only flavour*.


I'll reserve final judgement for when the darling comes back from KL/JB so that we can try the tonkotsu and crab broths as well, but first impressions are that it absolutely does not live up to expectations.

Ramen Dining Keisuke Tokyo is on the 3rd floor of PARCO in Millenia Walk. Non-Halal.

4 comments:

  1. gosh, how many ramen outlets are there in singapore anyways? sounds like it's gotta be at least quadruple the number of kl's outlets! :D

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    1. I don't know, ha ha. I wouldn't be surprised if there were close to twenty (or even more) dedicated ramen-only joints, and dozens more other izakaya and restaurants that also serve decent Ramen. Was apparently a big "craze" here over the last couple years where everyone and his mother wanted to open a ramen joint.

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  2. Nice blog esp on Ramen. Ever tried O-an @ Hong Leong? I recalled the ramen used to be good. The restaurant is packed with japanese during lunch time...Only managed to read abt it in hungrygowhere & 1 blog

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    1. There's so many Japanese restaurants in Singapore that it's probably/possibly impossible to try them all :) Thanks for the suggestion, gonna try O-An one of these weekends :)

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