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| - First of all, I have to start off with saying that I went to Niwatei the day after returning from a crazy Japanese food eating feast in Vancouver, so my taste buds were a little on their high horses from all the awesome food I'd been eating. I had heard from friends that this ramen place had opened up and my husband and I were anxious to try it. I really really wanted to like this place. But unfortunately, it needs a lot of work to be up to the standards of 4 star ramen place.
We decided to make the trek up to J-Town for a Friday lunch. It was busy, but we got a table right away. Unfortunately, after we were seated we had to wait longer than 5 minutes before getting a menu and we only got a menu because I got up to ask the waitress. I noticed that there were two menus--one appetizer menu and one noodle menu--and the waitress only gave me the noodle menu. I just ignored the fact that we didn't get an appetizer menu because I was sooo hungry. My husband ordered the Chasu ramen and I ordered the shio ramen (with a substitute of chicken instead of chasu pork--no extra charge).
My shio ramen was a little disappointing. The noodles were really good though. The soup base was really salty and left a weird greasy aftertaste in my mouth. Also the kitchen only gave me enough chicken to fit on my soup spoon! I thought that that was a little stingy! Once I started to eat the chicken, I was kinda glad that I only got so little because it was really really salty. The rest of the ramen was okay, kinda skimmpy on the ingredients (veggies, etc.). They wanted to charge us $2.50 for 1/2 an egg! That is ridiculous!
My hubby like his ramen overall, but felt it was way too salty. His meat portion was a little more realistic to the price--with 5 pieces of slow cooked Chinese style pork.
The waitresses were pleasant, but really need to learn how to be waitresses. They seemed a little out of it--i.e. not giving us a menu and not seeing our waving hands when we were trying to ask for the bill.
We probably won't be back to this place for a while, but I'm curious to try the appetizers, so maybe we'll give it a try again in the new year.
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