Tampopo @ Liang Court

Tampopo at Liang Court seems to be a very popular Japanese restaurant.  At as early as 6pm, you already see queues start to form at the restaurant, with hungry patrons waiting to get their table.

We went in at around 5.30pm, just to beat the crowd, and it proved to be a wise decision.  I ordered their original Kyushu Ramen and grilled Aji.

I must admit I was actually a bit worried about how the ramen would turn out.  Based on my own experience with ramen, those 'authentic' Japanese ramen tend to be very salty, too salty for your health and my own taste buds.  However, Tampopo's ramen gave me a surprise.

The soup base is thick as expected and full of flavours, but it is not too salty, just nice.  Maybe it will be a bit plain to those with strong taste buds, but for me, just nice.  The soup is creamy and you can tell from your first  sip that the soup must have been boiled for many hours.  The ramen itself is cute, a little bit chewy but nice.  It somehow reminds me of the Vietnamese noodle that I had in Saigon some years ago.

Grilled Aji is not bad too.  I am not sure, but I suspect aji in Japanese is something like our saba fish, which is used in Korean cuisine as grilled fish.  Anyway, the fish was nicely done, and you can peel off the fish skin completely.

In conclusion, it is a pretty nice restaurant that provides reasonable Japanese food at reasonable price.

My rating: 3.5/5