Tsujita Ramen: More Pork Overload in the Westside

S. & I had a late lunch at Tsujita Ramen on Sawtelle today after running a bunch of errands. Tsujita is a recently opened branch of Tokyo's famous Nidaime Tsujita ramen chain, which only recently started serving its famous ramen and only at lunchtime. I've heard plenty of reports of hour long lines, but fortunately since we were there so late, around 2pm, we were seated in about 5 minutes. I ordered the tsukumen with egg and S. had the regular ramen with egg. The tsukumen comes with a very concentrated porky dipping sauce and fairly thick chewy noodles, while the ramen comes with thin noodles, cooked hard, medium or soft, and a more traditional tonkatsu broth. Even though Jonathan Gold preferred the tsukumen in the LA Weekly review, I actually preferred the regular ramen, both for the relatively lighter broth as well as thinner noodles. The tsukumen was just too much work and I can only take so much pure porkiness. I appreciate the 60 hours of pork bone stewing, but the resulting broth is really strong. Even Yamadaya, which I really like, is too rich for me by the end of the bowl. I've found that I can only really take the shoyu version at Yamadaya. I'd say the ramen broth at Tsujita is slightly lighter with more subtlety than the Yamadaya ramen and the noodles are excellent. I like their soft boiled egg as well, and the bowls weren't huge, but we were stuffed afterwards. I never got the hot water into my concentrated broth as promised when finished, but I was too full anyway. Service was quite slow; we had to work to flag them down to get water refills, the check and they never came to offer to refill my broth. With such a small space and long waits, it's a little unfortunate. Not sure if there was any MSG in the broth, but I was in serious ramen coma afterward. We also drove by Ramen Jinya under construction also on Sawtelle, looks like the Westside is about to be ramen central soon!