Just above our local grocery store and below a towering high-rise apartment building are a cropping of restaurants, shops, and cafes practically hidden from plain view. After a morning of grocery shopping we usually pop upstairs to one of the local restaurants for a bite to eat. One place in particular always catches our eye: Asara Ichidai, a Japanese style ramen restaurant.
I don’t know how many times we walked by the unassuming and somewhat hidden Asara Ichidai, peering into the windows out of curiosity, mentioning to the other that we should try it one of these days. To be honest, we weren’t exactly optimistic about the ramen. For one, it’s hard to find decent bowl of ramen outside of Japan (or outside of major cities with Japanese ramen chains) and second, Korean restaurants have a tendency to “Korean-ize” foreign cuisine so that it’s more suited to Korean palates.
One cold and rainy early afternoon we walked upstairs in search of coffee and instead found ourselves in Asara Ichidai, anxiously awaiting two hot, steaming bowls of ramen.
