Whenever you go to a ramen restaurant you’ll likely be craving noodles, but for every bowl of ramen ordered, there are loads of other dishes on the menu that tend to get overlooked. That’s why our reporter Seiji Nakazawa has started a new investigative series called rameshi (ra for ramen and meshi meaning “meals“), which we’ve also sometime referred to as “Non-ramen Ramen Restaurant Stars,” shining a spotlight on the non-noodle meals you can find at ramen restaurants, and his latest search took him to Japan’s Ichiran ramen chain.
Ichiran is a particularly good place to explore the non-noodle menu items, because fans of the chain have been raving about a special meal you can make here, which they’ve dubbed “Ichirandon” or “Ichiran Rice Bowl“. However, you won’t find it listed on the menu, as you have to order a selection of side dishes to create it, leading people online to refer to the Ichirandon as a “secret menu item."
To make your own Ichirandon, you’ll need to order the following dishes: Smoke-flavored Stewed Pork, Half-boiled Salted Egg, and Rice.
Once you have all three dishes in front of you, simply pop the stewed pork on top of the rice…
▼ …then add the egg, and you’re done.
It really does look like a chef-made rice bowl, although you might want to take a bite out of the egg first to stop it from rolling off the meal.
The soft-boiled egg had a melty yolk, adding a delicious richness to the pork. However, as the rice bowl was quite small, Seiji couldn’t fit all the pork on it at once, but that led him to discover different intensities of flavor as he added more meat throughout the meal.
The first few bites were relatively light in flavor, but after adding more meat and allowing the yolk to run into it all, the taste became stronger and even more delicious.
The pork comes with a sachet of the chain’s famous Original Red Dry Sauce, so you can add a good scattering of it to the meal for even more flavor.
This powder adds more depth to the Ichirandon, so that every mouthful evolves and develops in a different way to keep your taste buds dancing.
After eating the Ichirandon, Seiji found himself strangely craving it again, which by his reckoning is the sign of a good meal. For 880 yen, it was a tasty rice bowl made even tastier by the secret nature of it, and he highly recommends it to anyone wanting a side dish to pad out their noodles at Ichiran.
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