LEO's Eats with Robin Garr
Rumplings' Piggy Bowl
Ramen guys do ramen and dumplings at Rumplings
Warmed by the delights of four big bowls of steaming ramen at Rumplings in five day's time, I asked my baby boomer pals on Facebook a simple question this week: When did you first encounter instant ramen? What did you think of it when you did?
The discussion quickly blew up into a sharp, snarky chorus of generally similar responses: We discovered ramen in college, most of us, and we loved it because it was cheap, quick and tasty with salty, delicious goodness.
Yeah, most of us gave it up later on, stunned in wiser maturity to learn of its horrific nutritional analysis, with half your day's allocation of fat, a boatload of MSG and all the sodium you need for the entire day, in a single serving. A real serving, that is. The weasels in marketing declare a "serving" to be half of a packet, to which I respond, "Bwahahaha!"
No more ramen for me, I thought, assuming that instant ramen was the ramen.
But no! Real ramen is something else entirely. The original dish, taken from China and perfected in Japan, is the stuff of which cult cuisine is made. Go stream "The Ramen Girl," if you want to know more. It's an engaging film about a young American woman who hilariously persuades a traditional, cranky and demanding old ramen chef to teach her the tricks of the trade.
Or, if you can't watch a foodie movie without getting hungry, simply cut to the chase. Head over, right now, to Rumplings Slurp Shop, where four of the city's most creative and passionate young chefs have been turning out authentic ramen bowls far into the night since last November, offering the Baxter nightspot strip a worthy alternative to pizza.
These guys - Dustin Staggers, also of Roux and the soon-to-launch Diner America, with his brother Kyle and chefs Griffin Paulin and Ethan Ray - are making ramen that would surely please even The Ramen Girl's crabby old boss. ...
Read the full review on LouisvilleHotBytes,
http://www.louisvillehotbytes.com/ramen ... -rumplings
And in LEO Weekly:
http://www.leoweekly.com/2015/03/ramen- ... rumplings/
Rumplings Slurp Shop
2009 Highland Ave.
No published phone
https://Facebook.com/Rumplings502
Robin Garr's rating: 92 points
