Ranking ramen
A new visualization of 145 ramen-slinging joints reveals surprising winners and losers
Tonkotsu or shoyu, spicy or mild, with bamboo shoots or without — however you order it, ramen is bound to be satisfying.
But there is great ramen — and then there is passable ramen. To determine which are worth your time and dollar, Rajesh Niti did one of his delightfully obsessive rankings of 145 restaurants serving ramen in the Bay Area.
Niti, as you may recall, is the Los Altos cancer researcher who did a breakdown of Bay Area Indian restaurants in February that got people riled up over the relative charms of Vik's Chaat versus Curry Up Now.
This time around, his visualization graph — which you can see at tinyurl.com/ramenchart — plots ramen purveyors on axes of price (vertical) and tastiness (horizontal). Restaurants in the lower-left quadrant are reportedly cheap but not as tasty. Those in the upper-right sector drain your wallet but are by most accounts sublime. The sweet spot is lower right, where price is low and taste scores high.
“This analysis was specifically done at the request of my childhood friend — we have known each other for 29 years now,” Niti explains. “She loves ramen and has her favorites in this area, and wanted to see how they ranked versus other ramen spots.”
To calculate, Rajesh scraped review and price data from websites like Yelp and Zomato and delivery sites like Grubhub and Uber Eats. He only included restaurants with a significant number of reviews. (The larger the dot on the graph, the more reviews that restaurant has.) Some folks might notice places that aren't particularly known for ramen — Berkeley's Manpuku, for instance, is famous for large portions of sushi.
“I didn't try to separate (places like that) because I saw that some sushi places seemed to be wellknown for their ramen as well,” says Niti.
The visualization sheds some light on the landscape of ramen in the Bay.
“Unsurprisingly, San Francisco has a lot of good spots along with
San Jose,” he says. “The most expensive ramen restaurant seems to be from Berkeley. Oakland shows up with some good ramen spots, as well. It also seems like ramen spots are popular near universities.”
What's the “best” ramen for quality versus cost? Brace yourself. The high scorers include Ramen Nagi (a South Bay chain), Nute's in San Francisco (which has a Thai menu section?) and Jijime, which is also in San Francisco and specializes in Korean-Asian fusion (?!!).
The highest-priced-but-worth it ramen, at least according to this accounting, is arguably Ramen Gaijin — it's in Sebastopol in Sonoma's wine country, so that's not particularly shocking. (You can get a “shoyu paitan” with asparagus and “rolled lamb shoulder chashu.”) A conspicuous holder of the “more expensive than average but not as tasty” label is Ramen Shop in Berkeley. Its Chez Panisse alums specialize in cooking with local, sustainable ingredients, preparing one ramen with braised daikon and smoked duck from Liberty Farms. While the bowls are definitely not cheap at up to $25, in this journalist's opinion, it doesn't deserve this dishonor.
Does Niti even like ramen, anyway?
“I absolutely enjoy ramen. Instant ramen made me an instant fan, and there has been no looking back,” he says. “I like Ramen Seas in Sunnyvale, but my childhood friend's favorite is Myzen Ramen (in Sunnyvale) — she absolutely swears by it.”