On a late summer’s day, dozens of people slurp steaming bowls of ramen—and nothing seems to stop them. Not the 90-degree day. Not the lack of air conditioning on the enclosed patio. Not the kicky kimchi or the spicy, sweat-inducing “endorphin sauce” on the bao buns. The whole scene is proof positive that, at least for some, ramen is religion, even on the most sweltering of Baltimore days.

A few months later, on a fall day, the space continues to draw ramen revelers who have eagerly anticipated the arrival of this spot thanks, in part, to some cheeky billboards, including one which read, “Goodbye crab cakes, hello ramen?”

As it turns out, there’s room for both in this crustacean-crazed town. And while nothing can ever replace our beloved state treasure, ramen is definitely feeling the love in Baltimore.

Then again, this is not just any ramen spot, but Toki Underground, the white-hot noodle joint that helped kickstart the Mid-Atlantic ramen craze when it first opened in a then-down-trodden D.C. neighborhood in 2011 and, thanks to its combination of quality and affordability, quickly earned a handful of Michelin Bib Gourmand nods.

“Toki D.C.”—as partner Jeff Jetton, along with Olivier Caillabet, and Christophe Richard, calls the noodle shop’s first foray—took over an attic space on the second floor of a popular H Street dive bar packed with containers of Utz cheese balls and transformed it into a world-class ramen restaurant.

Toki 2 has similarly scrappy roots in the Harwood section of Baltimore. The partners chose Baltimore in part because Jetton has family here. This second location, on the site of the former Bottom’s Up Bagels, has three times as many seats as Toki D.C., so snagging a reservation is less of an ordeal, and wait times for walk-ins (and carryout) are kept to a minimum.

Designed by Christophe Richard, son of the late James Beard Award-winning chef Michel Richard, the space is a visual wonderland with its kinetic skate deck ceiling, shokuhin food samples on display, stickered walls, and tiny Japanese toys and trinkets. Replete with a yellow “Violation” placard affixed to a restaurant wall—a souvenir from when the Baltimore City Health Department mistakenly shut them down for operating without a license (before they had even opened)—the space exudes a kind of oddball anarchy.

The whole effect is Pee Wee’s Playhouse…if it had been set in Asia.

“Toki is more than a restaurant—everywhere you look there is work by amazing artists and fabricators,” notes Jetton. “We’ve been so lucky to tap into that incredible community,” adds Richard.

Toki celebrates Baltimore’s creative scene with 20 or so local artists—KC Corbett, Evangeline Gallagher, and Ainsley Burrows, among them—contributing everything from murals to motion graphics to furniture. Even the indie playlist was curated by local rap band Infinity Knives. (Fun fact: Jetton also recruited his friend, Academy Award-nominated special-effects designer Tony Gardner, to help flesh out the playful vision.)

The menu, which Caillabet says focuses on “simplicity and seasonality,” is similarly spirited. Toki is not a traditional noodle house but more izakaya-style—think Japanese tapas—with small plates of pickled things, bao buns, root beer wings, and other items for sharing.

In addition to a slate of pork-based ramen, there’s also a delectable vegan version made with a tasty mushroom-soy broth and a gluten-free option using Japanese yam noodles. If you don’t want to slurp, there are two broth-less noodle dishes, including shiitake and cashew dan dan noodles with miso-chile paste and mazeman noodles entangled with a variety of proteins, a soft egg, pickles, fried shallots, and various vegetables that are liberally doused with a sweet soy and black garlic sauce.

Of course, you must get at least one bowl of ramen, whose foundation is ladled from a 100-quart pot of rich tonkotsu broth that simmers for 18 hours. The bowls (classic, curry chicken ramen, kimchi, vegan, or red miso ramen) are built with thick, toothsome Japanese Myojo noodles and a rich pork-bone elixir that clings to each noodle, resulting in a happy marriage of taste and texture. Ramen hallmarks like tender chashu pork, a half-boiled seasoned egg, pickled ginger, and a scattering of scallions also add harmony to the one-bowl meal.

Before you tuck into your soup, consider the ethereal cloud shrimp served with kimchi-Kewpie mayo, or the fried chicken steamed buns paved with a sweet chile sauce and Japanese mayo—these were actually my favorite items on the menu.

Wash it all down with the signature Toki Monster cocktail, which you should get for the garnish alone: a skewer of grilled pork belly teetering across a rocks glass filled with Japanese whisky and a splash of vanilla-orange syrup.

One thing you won’t see on the menu, jokes Jetton, is crab cakes. “After the fun dust-up, I said, ‘What if we actually did make crab an enemy and said, No crabs on the menu!’”

TOKI UNDERGROUND 2731 Greenmount Ave., 443-449-5392. PRICES: Starters: $4.50-18; ramen; $15.50-22; dessert: $7. HOURS: Wed.- Thurs. 5-9 p.m.; Fri.-Sat. 5-10 p.m.; Sun. 5-9 p.m. AMBIANCE: Skateboard chic.

PekoPeko Ramen opened earlier this year in a fancy new student apartment building near The Johns Hopkins University’s Homewood campus. It appears to have caught on with not only undergraduates but with Charles Village residents, too.

I love ramen and I’m ready to defend it against claims that it’s just another food trend. Some things trend for good reason, and ramen is nourishing, fast, comforting, and filling. I wish there had been a ramen shop near my college campus. Ramen works very well as a group dining activity, but it’s also perfect for solo eating. The young owner of PekoPeko Ramen, Hopkins alumnus David Forster, knows this, and he’s outfitted PekoPeko with a spacious kitchen-front counter for single diners. (Extra credit is earned for the coat-and-bag hooks under the counter and for the numerous outlets for phone charging.)  

Forster lived from age 6 to 18 in Tokyo, one of the world’s great food cities, where he became enthralled with Japan’s ramen-shop culture, which has enormous youth appeal. Opening a noodle place near Hopkins, Forster says, felt like a winning idea.

And PekoPeko is a winning little restaurant, beginning with the uplifting interior space, which has the clean contemporary lines of a museum cafe. Music is played at comfortable levels, and the service is friendly and attentive.

The menu has been kept compact with a centerpiece of six ramen options. But it includes a few choices—rice bowls and appetizers—that will appeal to other folks. I really loved the Shaki Shaki salad—a cool, crunchy mix of napa cabbage—as well as the gyoza dumplings, plumply packed with minced pork, cabbage, and ginger. 

PekoPeko specializes in Tokyo-style ramen, notable for its use of long-simmering chicken broth as opposed to the pork broths seen elsewhere in the U.S. The particular broth specialty is the shoyu-style, which has a soy sauce base. This is the place to start at PekoPeko to discover how well-executed the ramen is here. 

You can see the care that’s gone into preparing the scallion, seaweed, and bean sprouts, and you can taste the deep flavor that comes from hours of simmering. But do move on to the TanTan bowl, with its aromatic broth of garlic oil, spicy chili sesame sauce, and ginger. 

A few things to know: PekoPeko is pronounced to rhyme with gecko-gecko. The name is a kind of onomatopoeic phrase roughly meaning “grumbling stomach,” according to Forster. Also, PekoPeko doesn’t take cash.  

---

›› PekoPeko Ramen 7 E. 33rd St., 410-635-1216. Hours: Tue.-Sun. 11 a.m. to midnight. Appetizers: $4-8; entrees: $10-13; desserts: $2-6. 

It seems the ramen revolution that was so ripe for explosion two summers ago has settled down to a slow simmer, with just a few new options popping up around Baltimore these days. Of these, Federal Hill’s Mi & Yu Noodle Bar has drawn particular attention, thanks to its chef and proprietor, Edward Kim, remembered fondly by old-school Baltimore foodies for his elaborate, modernist cooking at Ixia and Soigne 15 years ago. Although the offerings are highly streamlined and firmly rooted in tradition, the food at Mi & Yu still possesses that fullness and depth of flavor one might expect from a highly seasoned chef.

On cold days, the windows at this charming, unfussy noodle bar are opaque with steam, while, inside, the narrow space stretches back from a sparse but bright dining area to a small galley kitchen that’s set up assembly-line style for massive volume.

In fact, that the kitchen is granted more real estate than the dining room is a very good portent.

Mi & Yu uses a modular menu system, wherein one chooses from an array of proteins, noodles, and broths to build a custom noodle bowl. This open-ended scheme may fluster ramen purists, but this place is billed as a “noodle bar,” and ramen is but one of the starches on offer, along with thick udon noodles and pho noodles.

Broth selection ranges from a clean, yet rich, Japanese miso to one flavored with the punch of Korean spicy peppers and garlic. All soups come with the same vegetables—napa cabbage, carrots, red onions, and daikon radishes—but you can further garnish with meats such as braised pork belly or short rib, duck carnitas, or even buttermilk-fried chicken. Seared tofu and vegetable broth options also are available for vegetarians.

---

NOODLE BOWL WITH PORK BELLY, KIMCHI, AND CHICKEN
We loved every combination of noodly noms, but the ramen topped with pork belly, kimchi, tender chicken, and a kick of ginger and spicy chili pepper, is a required order.

---

Most individual components seem recognizable enough, but the preparations are drawn from such diverse cuisines that for the adventurous, it is possible to end up with a fairly off-the-wall concoction. (The sweetness and five-spice flavor of the pork belly make for an unusual pairing with the already complex sambal broth, for example.) But, whether it’s thanks to careful menu planning or straight-up culinary chops, it’s nearly impossible to come up with a combination that’s anything less than tasty (if unconventional) and deeply satisfying.

And while regular patrons seem to have it down pat, rattling off their orders in efficient Starbucks-style staccato, first-timers are often seen gripped in menu-gazing paralysis, as is apt to happen with so many options.

To avoid such a fate, one need only be armed with the following six words: “pork belly, kimchi, ramen, add chicken.” It is this combination that provides the most intense, yet familiar, flavors, pleasing contrast in textures, and the all-important “ahhh”-inducing feeling that is only attainable from a good bowl of noodle soup. The kimchi broth is deeply savory, with unmuted high notes of ginger and spicy chili pepper—indeed, the only caveat would be the considerable heat. The barely resilient texture of the ramen noodles, whose crinkliness helps transport a bit more of the broth in every bite, is nicely offset by the napa and daikon mixture, which is right at home with the kimchi flavor.

So, too, is the pork belly, which is seasoned subtly enough that the five-spice merely perfumes without overwhelming. The buttermilk-fried chicken frankly speaks for itself, and is straightforward enough to complement any permutation with a bit of crunch.

Pro tip: Mi & Yu does not take carryout orders over the phone, only online via its website or mobile app, which is also where one can find timely updates about the availability of the elusive special “beef dashi broth.”

There are other noodle bars in town, but this one is not to be missed.

---

MI & YU NOODLE BAR 1016 S. Charles St., 443-388-9295.
HOURS Mon.-Thurs. 12-10 p.m., Fri.-Sat. 12-11 p.m., Sun. 12-9 p.m.
PRICES Noodles: $11.50-14.
ATMOSPHERE Minimalist zen.

A symphony of slurping is in full force at Ejji. It’s lunchtime at the Belvedere Square Market ramen shop, and all six stools at the countertop are occupied by hard-core devotees of the ramen revolution. They’re scooping slices of roasted pork belly and springy noodles with chopsticks, inhaling rich broth from wooden ladles, and generally eating with abandon. And they’re not being quiet about it.

Nine miles south, a similar scene unfolds inside the nondescript food court at Charles Towers, where the favored choice is Vietnamese pho from the Mekong Delta restaurant. Somehow, even on an 88-degree May Saturday in a city not exactly known for its adventurous tastes, people are pining for a hot bowl of Asian noodle soup.

“Culturally, it’s an indicator that Baltimore’s scene is getting more advanced in terms of flavor palate,” says Phil Han, owner of Dooby’s in Mt. Vernon, which serves ramen. “Ten years ago, I think ramen here would have been a complete bust, but now you’re finding this awesome foodie audience in town that is supporting things like The Emporiyum food festival. Ramen just happens to be an element of that bigger scene.”

Luan Nguyen and his wife, Tuyen Vo, opened Mekong Delta in a small Saratoga Street row house in 2009 before relocating five years later. Its popularity has not waned despite an uptick in restaurants serving pho and the even more recent arrival of ramen on the noodle scene. “People have found out that [pho] has so many nutrients—it’s good for their health,” says Nguyen. “I often see people who don’t want to give up their bowl. They drink everything until you see the pepper on the bottom. It’s a good sign.”

For Aaron Larrimore, pho—generally made with beef-bone-based broth, beef or chicken, and rice noodles—was his gateway drug to ramen, which is usually pork-based with wheat noodles. “I don’t know why I love eating ramen, I just do,” says the Bolton Hill resident and Dooby’s regular. “I love it because it’s a great mix of ingredients and the flavor is amazing. I never say no to it.”

He’s not alone. Mt. Washington resident Gina Bruno is perched atop a stool at Ejji, which opened last October. “It’s like nothing I’ve tasted before,” she says between slurps. “I like the texture of the noodles and I really love the miso [broth]. It’s comforting and filling and delicious. It’s so good it doesn’t even matter how hot [the weather is].”

These days, pho is associated purely with Vietnam, while ramen is considered an export of Japan. Truthfully, neither country can claim exclusive rights to its (unofficial) national noodle dish. The origins of pho, like many cuisines around the world, are mired in geopolitics. “Given our history with the Chinese going back thousands of years, of course we had noodles,” says Cuong Huynh, a San Diego-based blogger, who runs the website LovingPho.com. “Because of where [Vietnam is] in Southeast Asia, we have a lot of rice instead of wheat, so we use rice noodles. If you look at Asian cuisines, a noodle dish is a meal in itself. So a noodle dish like pho is rarely just a course in a meal; it is the meal. In Vietnam’s culinary history, we probably had something similar to pho in one form or another, but it is believed that not until the French came over did we start to make beef broth with such technique as done in pho.”

Pho—pronounced “fuh,” not “foe”—is made with a lighter broth in the north of the country, as opposed to a darker and sweeter one in the south.

Ramen also can trace its roots to China. It is believed to have arrived in Japan with Chinese tradesmen around the turn of the 20th century. Prepared in multiple ways in different regions of Japan, the bedrock of ramen soup is the noodle, made with wheat flour, water, and kansui, an alkaline mineral-rich water that gives it its yellow color and springy texture.

Despite their similarities, each found a different path to popularity in the United States. Ramen was popularized here in its instant form. Beloved for its ease of preparation and mind-bogglingly low cost, you’d be hard-pressed to find a former college student who doesn’t (usually fondly) recall capping a night of partying by devouring a bowl of ramen noodle soup in a dorm room. Its rise from penny-saving pantry filler (remarkably, a six-pack can still be bought for a buck) to the main attraction at New York hotspots like Ippudo and Momofuku is less clear. But if anyone knows, George Solt does. An assistant history professor at New York University, he completed his doctorate in the history of modern Japan at the University of California, San Diego. His dissertation was entitled, “Taking Ramen Seriously: Food, Labor, and Everyday Life in Modern Japan.” “Sushi became the representative food of Japan in the 1980s abroad, when Japan was a major business competitor to the U.S.,” he told The New Yorker in 2014. “The whole embrace of Japanese popular culture in the last 10 years is because Japan is no longer an economic threat. That image got transposed to China. It used to be Japan’s burden.”

Pho arrived in the U.S. in the same manner much of our ethnic food did—with the influx of immigrants. “Vietnamese refugees came to the U.S. in waves that stretched over almost two decades,” says Lovingpho.com’s Huynh, who was among the first to arrive here after the end of the Vietnam War in 1975. “The first wave, like us, we came over and basically had nothing to eat from the homeland. It was not until the late ’70s and early ’80s that the second and third waves came over.” Critical mass gave pho vendors the customers to survive. Today, there are almost 2,000 pho restaurants spread out across the U.S. and Canada, according to PhoFever.com. It lists 62 spots in Maryland, ranking the state ninth for the country as a whole.

In the cramped kitchen at Dooby’s, a Korean-inspired coffeehouse and restaurant on North Charles Street, chef Tim Dyson grabs a fistful of ramen noodles from a package and drops them into one of four small strainers, which he then lowers into an industrial-sized pot of boiling water. “I feel like the next movement in food is very much toward the everyday diner,” he says while waiting for the noodles to cook. “Ramen fulfills that. It’s a little bit of starch, a little bit of protein—that’s the comfort food that people want.”

Dyson doesn’t try to hide the fact that he doesn’t make his own noodles. It’s no secret that almost all ramen shops get theirs from the same supplier: Sun Noodle. The company uses 11 different types of flour, depending on the customer’s requirement for texture or taste, and makes 90,000 ramen portions a day at its factories in Hawaii, California, and New Jersey.

Dooby’s gets its fresh noodles in twice a week. That’s the easy part. Making tonkotsu, or pork-bone-based broth, is by far the more time-consuming portion of the process. Dyson uses seaweed, mushroom caps, and pigs’ feet for the gelatin and the base of the stock. He adds roasted chicken bones and pork necks, and then finishes it with bacon scraps. It takes about two days to prepare before simmering throughout dinner service. Tare, or seasoning (miso, soy, and salt are the most popular), is placed on the bottom of the bowl, which is filled with broth, then topped with the noodles, protein, and garnishes such as a soft-boiled egg. For a dish that emerges from the kitchen so quickly after it’s ordered, it’s hardly a fast food to prepare.

“We’ve found a ramen that we think is a good fit for who the audience is today,” Dooby’s Han says. “We don’t go super heavy on the pigs’ feet when we make our broth, because we don’t want to do overkill on the sticky-lip feel, which you’d find in a very classic, heavy pork tonkotsu ramen where you get a sticky, gelatinous feel. Ramen is very much a self-interpreted dish. Ramen shops in Austin, TX, top it with Texas-style brisket. Our take is more Korean, and not classically Japanese. We’ll feature our house-made kimchi as a garnish, which brightens the bite.”

At Ejji, chef and co-owner Ten Vong serves miso corn and Malaysian curry broth, in addition to the traditional tonkotsu. The Baltimore-born chef returned to Baltimore from New York, where he estimates there are 60 ramen shops. (For comparison, United Kingdom newspaper The Independent recently reported that there are 4,000 in Tokyo, and 80,000 throughout Japan.) “We are doing a more nontraditional take,” says Vong, who also gets his noodles from Sun. “A lot of the younger people are driving it. I see a demand for it everywhere, especially in markets where they don’t have any. Baltimore [has] just started getting dedicated ramen shops.”

While the dish has been on the crowded menus of Asian grab-bag restaurants like Nina’s Espresso Bar on Calvert Street and Shiso Tavern in Canton, Baltimore didn’t have its first dedicated ramen shop until TenTen opened in 2014. The Mt. Vernon shop offers a wide variety of traditional ramen, as well as specialty bowls like curry and chop chashu men. Ejji soon followed, and now the dish is popping up in more and more restaurant kitchens around town—with some creative interpretations.

“I love ramen, but I make pasta and we have a wine bar,” says Cyrus Keefer, executive chef at 13.5% Wine & Food in Hampden. His solution? An Italian ramen hybrid. “I make my ramen broth with our salumi. I take all the ends and utilize the umami from the salumi making. I use black garlic for depth. I take the capellini and poach it in baking soda water to give it the same tone as you would get from the ramen noodles, and then we finish it with pickled mushrooms and bacon. The result tastes like ramen.”

When Jason Chang opened his family’s sixth Katana sushi restaurant in Canton earlier this year, he made one addition to the menu: ramen. The only problem was that neither he nor his parents knew how to make it. So they got a lesson and some pre-made frozen broth from their food distributor, JFC International. “Now we buy pork bones and make our own fresh broth that we simmer in the back for three or four days,” he says. “I got much better feedback from the customers. I felt the business would do good in a city environment with young people, because people drink and they eat noodles.”

That’s one of the reasons Saigon Today opened just a few blocks east in Canton. The fact that the neighborhood, better known for cheap pizza, now boasts a ramen shop and a pho joint says something about the growing popularity of noodles. In Mt. Vernon, next-door neighbors each offer pho. While it’s one of many items on the menu at Minato, it’s a star at Indochine, whose co-owner, Amy Nguyen, uses pork bone’s beef marrow, ginger, star anise and cinnamon sticks in her stock. Her rice noodles are supplied by a California vendor.

Nguyen was 8 years old when she arrived here from Vietnam in 1987, a year younger than aforementioned pho pro Luan Nguyen (no relation) was when he survived a harrowing three-day boat trip from Vietnam to Thailand before ultimately landing in Rochester, NY. He became a high-school English teacher and taught in Baltimore’s Cherry Hill neighborhood before returning to Vietnam to teach for another seven years. He and his wife, Tuyen, moved back to Baltimore in order for their sons to have an American education. They opened Mekong Delta so they could work together, and it quickly became Baltimore’s go-to spot for pho, earning a reputation for quality and authenticity.

“I was very impressed with the first taste of the broth,” food blogger Victoria Tran wrote in her 2013 review of Mekong’s pho. A flight attendant from San Francisco, Tran has made it her mission to eat a bowl of pho in all 50 states. She’s made it to 27 so far, and recorded her findings on her blog, PhoAcrossAmerica.com. “It was a tad salty, but very good. I cut the saltiness with lime and discovered that the broth, a little darker than what I’m used to, contained a masterful blend of spices. It had a slight sweetness and a rich array of flavors. . . . Overall, it was really a great bowl of pho. It was so flavorful and warm, like a Vietnamese hug.”

That’s not a coincidence. A small, soft-spoken woman, Tuyen Vo learned to cook from her grandmother in Vietnam. She listens as her husband translates.

“What’s the key to making great pho?” he relays. She waits for a moment, and then answers in Vietnamese, as a smile spreads across her face.

“Just a feeling,” she replies.

---

Noodle Know-How

There’s no one way to eat ramen and pho. While some noodle lovers might dig in without a plan, others take more of a step-by-step approach. Here are the expert’s suggestions on how to slurp:

1. Much as you’d taste an entrée before adding salt or pepper, sample the broth before adding hot sauce, hoisin, or anything else for that matter. Says Phil Han of Dooby’s: “That will tell you if the quality is there. Can you find the true spirit of the broth?”

2. Grab the ladle with your left hand, the chopsticks with your right. Use the chopsticks to taste the noodles first, then the ladle to sip the broth. (Bring your mouth down to the chopsticks over the bowl, not your chopsticks up to your mouth. In other words, sticking your face in the bowl is considered kosher.)

3. After trying the noodles and broth, mix everything up. Now, feel free to dive into the protein and garnishes.

4. Remember, slurping is perfectly fine! (In fact, slurping—and burping—is considered a compliment to the chef.)

5. While no one knows why, it’s customary to leave a little broth at the bottom of the bowl, which is the norm in Asia (though very much optional here).

Could Baltimore be on the cusp of an actual noodle house scene, à la The Great Pizza Awakening (a moniker we just coined) of the past few years? If so (and we so hope it’s so), Mt. Vernon will be the epicenter, with the opening of TenTen Ramen, Baltimore’s first dedicated Japanese ramen shop.

While sushi can be readily found, other examples of Japanese cuisine, especially ramen, have always been elusive until the recent revolution, probably due to the lack of Japanese immigrants in the area. Nevertheless, on any given visit to TenTen (situated in the space where Joss Sushi and Kawasaki once were), odds are you’ll overhear conversations in Japanese, which is a very good sign when you’re eating food from the Land of the Rising Sun.

Those who only know ramen from their days as impoverished students are in for a revelation. The ramen here is the real deal—fresh, springy noodles, deeply flavored broths, and a wide array of toppings. Granted, all of those are requirements for a worthy ramen shop, but none is easy to pull off. TenTen does an excellent job.

The spicy tonkotsu ramen ($10.50) has become our go-to iteration due to its intense, hearty flavors and beautifully varying textures. It combines a rich, milky broth made from pork bones, spicy oil, and toppings like menma (marinated bamboo shoots), chashu (braised pork belly), crisp bean sprouts, hard-boiled egg, narutomaki (fish cake) slices, and scallions, and is, in fact, based on a Chinese dish.

Several rice dishes are on offer as well, most notably the katsu curry ($10.50), which is actually a combination of tonkatsu (breaded chicken cutlet) and karé (Japanese-style curry), wherein the karé acts as a sort of super-gravy. Smaller plates like guo tie (fried dumplings, $6.50), edamame ($3.50), and geso (fried squid, $7), which one diner aptly described as “squid French fries,” round out the menu.

Service is friendly and knowledgeable. While you’re waiting for your food, browse TenTen’s selection of hard-to-find Japanese specialty items or jam to the upbeat J-pop that’s barely audible over the sound of enthusiastic noodle consumption.