Tonkotsu ramen at NiwateiFernando Morales/The Globe and Mail
Markham's J-Town Japanese mall is one of the coolest places in the GTA. You can buy a bento box, origami paper, wagyu and kobe beef, Japanese books and DVDs, pastries and groceries. There's sushi, a new izakaya restaurant, and the 100-per-cent loveable new Niwatei, where they make fresh noodles daily. The standards are so high that when I request ramen to go, the server says: "I am sorry, but we do not do takeout. The noodles would not taste right."
I am a ramen person. Noodles in soup are my ultimate comfort food. They make a good day better and a bad day tolerable. On Air Canada, when others are downing overpriced industrial fowl sandwiches, I get the Cup-a-Soup, which is bastardized ramen. It's awful. The noodles are cardboard, the broth is chemical, but it's better than no ramen. Given this predilection, you can understand my great joy at meeting the real thing!
Although Niwatei is culturally Japanese, ramen comes originally from China. The Japanese had been enjoying it since the late nineteenth century but it was not widely available until Japanese soldiers returned from China after World War Two and brought home a new taste for Japanese foods like ramen. Thanks to cheap American flour flooding the Japanese market in the 1950s, ramen shops proliferated in Japan. When Momofuku Ando invented instant noodles in 1958, ramen went viral. At that point it split into two strands - fast food and traditional.
Traditional ramen has three components: broth, noodles and garnish. Niwatei has three broths: miso, shio (soy sauce) and tonkotsu (pork bone). The miso broth avoids the possible pitfall of strong miso taste; it's subtle and vaguely sweet. The soy broth has a hint of smoke and is not, thank goodness, too salty. But hands down, the best broth is the tonkotsu, pork bones boiled for so long over high heat that the broth goes milky and becomes almost creamy from the pork fat and connective tissue. It's strong, deep-flavoured and mellow.
Then there are the noodles. The difference between a homemade noodle and a store-bought one is like the difference between the texture of a proper risotto and Rice-a-Roni. Ramen uses wheat noodles, long and thin but not vermicelli. Noodles are mostly about texture. You want them al dente, with some bite but yielding. The taste aspect of noodles is harder to describe. They taste fresh - or they don't. These do.
The third pillar of ramen is more forgiving than the first two. Variation is permissible in the garnish, although tradition suggests sliced pork, scallions and fish cake. The tonkotsu comes with hard-boiled egg, fish cake, slices of sweet tender pork, strong red pickled ginger and scallions. Same garnish for the others, plus corn in the miso ramen.
$12.80 buys Niwatei's set dinner, which includes your chosen ramen, an appetizer and dessert. The apps are as wonderful as the ramen. Inari is perfectly cooked sushi rice in a delicate tofu wrapper. No raw fish. Beef with rice is the tender sugary soy-inflected beef of sukiyaki, further sweetened by gently sautéed onions and spiked with pickled ginger batons. Mini beef curry is spicy and rich, jazzed with hot red pickled daikon. Gyoza are pork dumplings that have been briefly pan-fried not too hot and are hence more delicate than usual.
The restaurant hates substitutions, but I find their desserts deplorable. Green-tea ice cream? Ho hum. Canned fruit with mitsumame (bean jelly)? No thanks. I would advise negotiating to have a second app instead of dessert. Sometimes they say yes.
Although Niwatei has the ambience of a small fast-food shop - thanks to Formica "wood" tables, no liquor licence, gold plastic on the chairs, and plain walls save for a few manga (Japanese cartoon) pics - it is anything but. Niwatei means "castle of the feather boat." An apt title for a restaurant serving ramen with a heart of gold.