A note on the words: chashu is the braised pork laid over a bowl of ramen, karaage is Japanese fried chicken, and gyudon and katsudon are rice bowls topped with simmered beef and with a fried pork cutlet. Tonkotsu is the pork-bone soup base. Prices are in US dollars and are as they stood at the time of the visit.
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Katanaya on Tabelog (in Japanese) — Tabelog has no English pages for restaurants outside Japan, so this listing is in Japanese. Opening hours and payment details are kept up to date there, not here.
Right, this is Hangover Meshi. Going all the way to America and eating ramen, of all things… is what I did briefly think. On the other hand, I got curious about what Japanese food — ramen, specifically — is like outside Japan, so I went along while we had some free time between discussions. The name: “Katanaya”! An American ramen shop!!!
It feels like a while since I saw Japanese writing lol Very reassuring!
PORK BELLY CHASHU RAMEN $17
KARAAGE RAMEN $18.5
YOKOZUNA RAMEN $20
Beef Donburi $19
Katsu Donburi $18.4
For the ramen you choose between miso, shoyu, lemon & salt and tonkotsu soups. Tonkotsu costs about $0.5 more.
Hmm, so the plain ramen is the PORK BELLY CHASHU RAMEN, I suppose?
Add karaage to that and it is the KARAAGE RAMEN, and add gyoza on top of that and it becomes the YOKOZUNA RAMEN lol
They properly have gyudon and katsudon as well, which is nice. The staff seemed Japanese, or at least seemed to understand Japanese.
This time I asked for the miso ramen.
Well, thinking about it calmly, $17 works out at 2,550 yen if you reckon 150 yen to the dollar!
In Japan people talk about a “1,000-yen wall” when it comes to the price of ramen, but abroad they sail straight through it lol
And after a while, out came this.
Miso ramen.
Yes, well, nothing strange about it.
The toppings are spinach, I think? plus nori, corn, scallions, chashu and a boiled egg.
The soup is properly hot, but there may be rather a lot of it lol The color is whitish overall, so perhaps the soup is made with white miso mixed in. One sip of the soup and — yes, it is perfectly, ordinarily delicious lol
It is of course not at the level of making you go, this is amazing!!!!
But it feels not far off the ramen you get up a snowy mountain or at the seaside. What is good about it is precisely that you can drink miso soup in America. Whether that experience alone is worth $20 is the question.
It is America, so as ever there is quite a lot of it, and this one bowl fills you right up lol
It is a hot place, so I had thought it might not be popular, but looking around the shop there were plenty of ordinary Americans in there, so I gather it is popular enough.
So: American ramen this time. I had expected something more idiosyncratic that would make me go, what?! — and it was nothing of the sort. It was ordinary, good ramen. The sense of price is a little different, but if this is what you can eat in America then it seems entirely reasonable to me! There are far more places in Japan doing better udon and ramen, so I do hope people abroad will come to Japan and eat that ^^
RAMEN KATANAYA (Ramen / Las Vegas Strip)
Tabelog lunch rating ★★★☆☆ 3.0
I ate here and paid for it myself. Nothing on this site is a comped meal.
One more for the road?
