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| - I've been waiting for this place to open for months ever since I read an article about it last fall. When I heard about the grand opening last Friday, some friends and I planned to have dinner there on Sunday. Sadly, they were closed. But we found out their hours and a friend and I went there today for lunch. In short, it was worth the wait!
Lunch service at Umami is pretty different from dinner service, or so we were told. We were seated right away, brought menus, and told to order up at the bar and they would bring us our food.
We decided to go with the trio of foods - dumplings, salad and ramen for $13. It was a really great deal. I ordered the Umami Mushroom Arugula salad, Veggie Dumplings with smoked tofu, bok choy and shiitake mushrooms, and Tonkotsu Ramen (pork ramen with egg, roast pork, bamboo shoots, nori and green onions).
The mushroom salad was delicious - shiitake, baby portabello, button mushrooms, red onion, cucumber and cherry tomatoes. Very fresh greens and vegetables, and the trio of mushrooms were very flavorful. I loved the sesame soy dressing on this salad. All of the salads sounded good, so I'm looking forward to trying others.
The dumplings were my favorite part of this meal. I was surprised to get a whole tray of 6 dumplings with my order! And let me tell you - the dumplings were amazing! They had the perfect pan-fried crust on the bottom, the dumpling was soft and chewy, and the flavors inside really melded together well. When I ordered, I was recommended a specific dipping sauce, and I heartily agree that the pairing of the spicy soy sauce with the veggie dumplings was spot-on. My friend had the pork and chive dumplings with a different sauce, and you could really taste the chive and ginger. Delicious!
Sadly, the ramen was only okay for me. The roast pork and egg was delicious, but I wasn't too excited about the broth. The broth was a little bland to me, but then I tend to really love bold flavors. If the broth was just a little bit richer in pork flavor, it would have made for an excellent bowl of ramen. Still, the other ingredients - the locally produced noodles, the egg, the nori and the green onions - stood out for me. The bamboo shoots were a unique flavor, but tasted a little bitter to me. It's probably more the type of bamboo shoot.
The service was very friendly, but a little unobservant at times when my water glass needed refilling and no one was around. But the owners are very nice, and they are still getting things finalized. They did a great job with the atmosphere and the interior.
I definitely want to go back for dinner to try out some of their cocktails which I hear are some of the best and most unique in Madison. I also want to try out some of their other dishes and appetizers because everything sounds so good. Overall, I give Umami 4 out of 5 stars, and who knows? That may change to 5 after a few more visits. :)
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