By Ilona Kinnear
After a long winter break, students are settling back into college. Salt covers the ground like hail, the long-awaited library has been finished and the cafeteria no longer has self-serve salad.
To all my leafy lovers, I feel your pain. I had some salad there on occasion, but, turns out, there weren’t many of us. Due to a lack of customers, Lancer decided to ditch the salad and make way for MSG (note that actual MSG content is unknown).
But despite the salad-shaped hole in my heart, I decided to give the new ramen place a try. First thing I see is the giant, one-foot diameter bowls that they serve it in. For seven bucks, it’s a decent deal, but maybe they should have different sizes for different prices. I don’t think many people could eat that much.
It’s hard to go wrong with any of their broth choices. They give you 3-4 ladles in a bowl. Out of the four that they have, my favorite so far is the spicy white miso. It is a bit lacking in spiciness for me, but I still liked what kick it had.
From their choices of meats/proteins, the BBQ pork loin was too dry and the tofu was too salty. I haven’t tried the marinated roasted chicken yet, so you’ll have to tell me how it is.
I’d say the best deal out of the ramen bowl is that you can go all out on the toppings for no extra charge. But my opinions of the toppings are as follows: the spinach and the sprouts and cabbage slaw are too dry and not made for soup, the corn has a funny taste to it, and my favorite topping is the soy-cured hard-boiled egg. The bamboo shoots, green onions, sesame seeds and nori are all what you would expect.
My major complaint about the ramen is that the noodles are worse than insta-ramen noodles. They are too dry and cold (being that they are stored over ice), which makes the entire bowl of ramen get too cold too fast to really enjoy properly. The broth itself is only a little over lukewarm to begin with, so you’d end up having to try and microwave it in order to give it more heat, though I don’t know if the giant bowl would even fit in the microwave.
In the end, the quality of miso ramen is what you would expect out of a college kitchen. If you want my opinion, grab yourself a burrito from Go Go Burrito instead.