なんつッ亭・品達店 Nantsuttei Shinatatsu @Shinagawa

We finally made our last trip of 2015 to the Land of the Rising Sun! And this time we started from Tokyo!

Our first real meal in Tokyo was at Shinagawa. We met JL, who recently started working in Tokyo. Funny that we always meet up when we are out of Singapore… 😛

Anyway, she used the powerful Google Maps to navigate our way to the Shinatatsu Ramen Street 品川駅前「麺達七人衆　品達」. This is an area below the railway tracks of JR Shinagawa Station 品川駅 which has a collection of 7 ramen shops. And Nantsuttei is the first one as you walked into the area (and incidentally one of the only two that were still operating, the others were closed for renovations because of some construction going on at the railway tracks).

Nantsuttei started from Kanagawa and has now quite a number of branches in Tokyo, Thailand and Singapore too (Orchard Central). There is quite a following for its celebrity founder Ichirô Furuya, and judging from the queue that we were seeing at the Shinatatsu branch, this was the ramen for us!

We just picked the Special Ramen (¥1050) and Chashu Ramen (¥1000), and the difference was that the special had the lovely egg. It might seem pricey, as most ramen were less than ¥1000, but there were 3 huge slices of char siew instead of the usual one piece. The broth was a rich, creamy tonkotsu soup and floating on the surface of the soup was fragrant black ma-yu (roast garlic oil). The ma-yu is the signature of Nantsuttei and is what makes it unique from the other ramen. We found the broth over-powering though. But eaten in a cold weather like this is simply ‘Shiok lah!’

On another note, it was a really huge bowl, and I was unable to finish it.. Ms V probably only finished half the bowl. Mission to fatten her up was not succeeding, haha!