Tsukemen Gonokami Seisakusho Taipei — Restaurant in Xinyi District

This restaurant mimicks (note the keyword here, "mimicks") a popular shrimp broth tsukemen restaurant located in Shinjuku ward, Tokyo. Let me start by saying that the original restaurant in Japan is one of my favourites places to get noodles in Tokyo, and shares nothing - if anything, only the name - with this petty Taiwan imitation. The first thing that is not ok with the Taipei branch is the ratio of quantity and price. The tsukemen is just not enough. I remember in the Tokyo branch, you cannot get through a normal size tsukemen without feeling really full. Here, you get served something that is probably around half of that size. And the broth is so little, and they try to fool you by putting it into this weird concave bowl to make it look like it's a lot. I'm sorry, it's not a lot at all. The price, on the other hand: that's kind of a lot. If I'm not mistaken with the yen-yuan conversion, it's even a bit pricier than the one in Japan (wow, seriously?). The second thing is the flavour, which is absolutely mediocre and really not worthy of the name this restaurant holds back in Tokyo. Something went wrong when the recipe was translated to Chinese? Last but not least, the service. The second time I visited this restaurant (which will of course also be the last time), I've literally almost been kicked out because at closure time (mind you, at 9 pm, not at midnight) we were still finishing the dish which we paid for. It's funny that you really believe you are a Japanese restaurant, even with this level of...

Great Tsukemen with shrimp base soup.

First to enter the restaurant, you need to get the queue number from the queue machine at the cashier inside the restaurant if no seat available.

Tsukemen come with the shrimp broth. Similar to shrimp bisque but more thick and more favor on the pork bone and ingredient. Anyhow, the shrimp favor is the first you can notice when eating.

The noodle and chashu come in the cold temperature. The dipping broth comes in hot temperature. You can ask staff to reheat the broth any time.

The noodle has the right thickness and soft with slightly chewy. The noodle comes cold then when you dip in the broth the noodle will not change their character and cold noodle can keep broth coating the noodle more in volume.

As I’m the fan of Tsukemen. I cannot stop dipping my noodle in the soup and continue eating til it finished. I give high score since I’m Tsukemen fan 🙂.

After the noodle finished, staff will pour over the clear base soup into Tsukemen broth. Then you can enjoy the rest of soup in another way. By the way, when the soup is diluted, I don’t feel much special than thick...

As soon as we entered the shop we can smelled the very fishy prawn smell. 3 options available in store: pure prawn base soup noodle, prawn with pork base dipping noodle or with additional tomato. We ordered the first two. It was bad service for first timers. The soup base was too salty for our taste, we had a really tough time finishing up our lunch but no one ever explained to us until we went to get our bill that they can add clear soup to make the dipping sauce into a drinkable soup.

My dad hates that shop gave us no flexibility to take our the food since we really couldn’t finish it and wanted to take the remaining noodle home to add water. He also dislikes that the wait staff hand wiped washed wooden chopsticks and spoons and put straight into the container on each table. He thought it was disgusting since half-wet bamboo or wooden utensils are prone to get molded.

I think the prawn based soup ramen is definitely unique but it is not full in flavor like the Singaporean prawn mee (prawn based style noodle soup), and it only cost 1/5 of the price :P ...