In honour of Noodle Month, here’s one of those foodie posts lurking in the depths of my drafts folder1.
Let’s imagine you’ve just arrived in Vancouver and hosteled yourself in your new (fancy-pants) accommodations. What’s the first thing you do? Unpack? Freshen up with a post-flight shower? Take a power nap? For my family, the first task at hand is always to find somewhere to eat! And there we ran into our first dilemma of the trip: WHERE to eat?! A check of the usual foodie websites did little to help our decision; everyone had nothing but nice things to say about everywhere within a 1 mile rambling radius of our fancy-pants digs (Coal Harbour/Downtown area).
And that is how we ended up at Sanpachi Ramen, just across the road on Bute St. Yes, we travelled 3 hours from ramen-land LA2 to ramen-land Vancouver
The broth was good, the noodles firm, and the char siew tender; a good pass on all the critical components of ramen.
And thanks to my foodie-cousin3, we had an excellent tour of the Hong Kong food in Richmond, BC, where we had the best wonton mein I’ve had in years4!
Perfectly al dente noodles with that characteristic bite and colour of lye noodles, with bite-sized meaty suigao and super-slippery wonton that can’t be eaten without some slurpage.
Vancouverites certainly know their noodles!
More photos of our too-short stay in Vancouver over on Flickr.
1 That is a total, 100%, complete falsification. I didn’t even know there was such a thing as noodle month; I’m just tired of having all these drafts cluttering up my dashboard. This is what we call in my lab: hypothesis after data.
2 We live pretty close to the Sawtelle Japanville cluster, and have a choice of 4 great, cheap ramen joints. Yeah, someday I may even share the addresses.
3 Who I now know reads this infrequent weblog, and must give top props to for being the ultimate, awesom-est Vancouver host-est with the most-est.
4 Gratuitous baby photo at McNoodle House, Richmond, BC.
akatsuki ra-ra-ra 
Mmmm love ramen! You need to try Santouka near Denman & Robson. So goooood!
Thanks for the rec; it’s going on the list for our next visit!
Toroniku ramen at Santouka is awesome! It is kinda expensive for ramen though (and the lineups are long).
We also like Kintaro (long lineups, really fatty soup) and Motomachi Shokudo (healthier). They are both on Denman and are from the same owner.
There’s a Santouka in LA too! http://www.yelp.ca/biz/santouka-ramen-los-angeles
No wonder I thought the name Santouka sounded familiar! That’s one of our favourite local ramen joints! I just call it the Mitsuwa ramen place since it’s in the same complex as the supermarket. Their pork broth is super rich and tasty.
It was also the site of Finlaggan’s first taste of ramen.