Kanji Ramen — Restaurant in Austin

5:53-7:15. New to the neighborhood and wanted to try it out. Our first experience, there were 4 of us and the service was awesome! I went last night and it was terrible customer service. My mother came into town and she hadn't had ramen like this so we took her. We arrived at 5:53. There was a table of 6 that was eating when we showed up and there were no available tables as they hadn't been cleaned off yet. I get it, it gets busy and sometimes it takes longer to clean em off, no biggie I've worked restaurant jobs before. We order and are seated. 3 ramen, one rice bowl and 3 teas. After waiting for about 15-20 mins, were brought the teas. A second family enters the establishment, 3 as well, and they order and are seated. They receive their drinks within 10 mins. A third group comes in, orders and sits. The previous family receives their order of food. The other group is still waiting for drinks and we are still waiting for our food. It's been 40 minutes now. A customer comes in and picks up their to go order at around 6:30. Now its 6:50 and a second customer has come in and picked up their to go order. We are still waiting for our order. Its 7 pm and I ask to change the order to go and she comes to the table and asks again what our order was. What? We Express that we're upset because we've now seen 3 customers be served after us, mind you the table of four is still waiting for their drinks, she tells us that because of our order, they are having to wait to make everyone else's. We just saw 3 other people get served after us. Then THE CHEF comes out and asks us for our order! We get our order and head home, eager to get out considering it's now 7:15. Once we're home, we check the food and NO RICE. Frustrations aside, the food tastes FANTASTIC so it wasn't the food that soured me, on Kanji Ramen. We will be staying away for awhile and I reccomend you order to go, considering you'll get your food faster than the patrons inside. We were there for over and hour and received 3 teas, 20 minutes in and bad service for...

Solid example of "they could've been great but...". Came here around 1pm. Ordered a chashu bowl, gyoza and the signature kanji ramen. Gyoza is a must everytime I go for ramen and I do judge the place based on how much I like it.

Their gyoza, It's one of those deep fried ones, not the pan fried gyoza (or at least that's what I think). Tasted like a typical gyoza with nothing more or special to say. Moving on to chashu bowl, this was very very disappointing. Honestly, I havent had chashu this bad in a while; tasteless and rubbery. Gave one to my friend and barely finished mine, when I got my kanji ramen and noticed it was the same chashu I just took it out of my ramen bowl and said "out you go". And now the signature kanji ramen, it's a tonkotsu ramen with soy based broth. The broth has the traditional tonkotsu flavor to it but also some mushroom ish flavor (I doubt its mushroom though), which is quite unique and I enjoyed it. Noodles are your traditional Japanese ramen noodle with firm texture, not the straight or thin noodles. The bowl came with chashu, ajitama, wood ear mushroom, grilled corn, bakchoi, nori, fried garlic, bamboo and kuromayu. Now I'm not going to pick on what needs to be or not in their ramen, especially since this is a signature ramen for them, but corn and bakchoi was definitely an interesting choice. Actually I enjoyed the bakchoi, it went pretty well with the broth. Ajitama though, I've had better, hell I've made some better tasting than that.

The server didnt seem enthusiastic about his job but the chef did come out and check on every table(which was really nice).

Honestly if you want to try something different, come over and try the kanji ramen. If I ever do come back, I'll give regular tonkotsu a try but I do hope they do something to that chashu because it is...

The food was just ok at best. The ramen broth was kind of sweet which was a bit odd. The noodles were hidden under the broth and when I tried to get my first bite, I was unpleasantly surprised to see that the noodles were in a huge clump and it took a long time for them to break apart and act like noodles. We got a shrimp maki which was actually like a crunchy shrimp roll. We also got the fried tofu which was a very very very VERY firm tofu so that was also a bit odd and distasteful. The next thing was the donkatsu slider which actually did not come on bread. It was served in slices with rice on the side. (maybe they don't know what "slider" means?) We got edamame which had HUGE chunks of salt ALLLLLLL over it. It was a bit overboard. Last and most importantly we got many orders of mochi icecream (like 8 orders) and they all tasted old. The mochi didn't have an elastic, stretchy, gummy etc texture. It was more like a dry piece of bread that had been frozen with icecream in the middle. We questioned if they were out of date. The whole experience was just not very nice. To top it all off, they didn't have the AC on and we were all sweating our butts off. We had two infants with us and they were both sweating from the heat and became uncomfortable during our dinner stay. I'm not sure if I would come back here. It's a sad day for us since we were REALLY looking forward to this place due to it being up north near Cedar Park. I still wanted to give a couple of stars for the cute interior and concept that they are trying...