Ramenya - Japaneese Noodle Soup

I've been told Ramenya is the best place in LA for Ramen! The funny thing is it's no where near Little Tokyo.  The website is modest, and features some of their top picks.  I love Asian soups so I was definitely on board to try it out.

We went on a weekday for lunch and arrived around noon.  We were waiting for a third so they asked us to wait to be seated until our party was complete.  We waited in the chairs they have outside the restaurant.  Inside, it was fairly crowded, as people left more people came.  After 20 min. or so I began to worry that we would have to go on the wait list once my friend arrived.  Since there was still a table open Grete and I decided to take a seat and let our friend Jeff catch up once he got there.

Everyone inside was having some sort of soup.  The menu was not overwhelming but everything looked really good.  I'm not schooled in ramen so I didn't really know the differences between the offerings outside of what the description indicated.  I decided on the Aho Noodle which is their garlic ramen. From the look of other people's bowls the 1 order would be enough for Grete and I to share.  We also got an appetizer of gyoza (Japaneses potsticker) just in case.

The potstickers were amazing and the soup came not too long after.  The bowl was huge, the soup was piping hot and smelled amazing.  Now, just fair warning, if you go and get this soup, it is FULL of garlic.  It was great, because I love garlic, but there are literally whole cloves floating in the soup.  They even have garlic cooked multiple ways.  Of course I doctored my soup a bit by adding some rooster sauce (my new favorite condiment.)  We finished the whole bowl.  The meal was incredibly satisfying.  This could be my new go to for the cold days in Chicago very near in my future. It's good we took our seats because when we were leaving there was a long line of people waiting.  Jeff ended up meeting us later in the day, instead of joining us for lunch.

If you're looking for something different, or maybe not so different just something good, grab some soup from Ramenya!  They're open from 11:30 - 9:30 everyday except Wednesday (closed).  Just bring cash because that is all they take :)