Tama Japanese Ramen & Bar — Restaurant in Canton

Tama is a great addition to a fairly desolate area of Canton. It's at the edge of Blue Hills and is right on the main drag, not too far from the highway and also near Trillium Brewing.

They offer a variety of Japanese dishes including sushi, ramen, Teriyaki, rice dishes, and quite a few other things. They have a beautiful, long bar with plenty of seating and a decently sized dining room. The decor is sleek, and very red with beautiful lanterns hanging from the ceiling. It's a tad dark in there however with little to no natural light.

The food itself is tasty - the crab Rangoon ($8.50) weren't traditional but tasted good and the pan-fried pork dumplings ($8.50) were excellent. I also really enjoyed the eggplant skewer ($4) cooked in the Kushiyaki style which I thought was awesome.

The Tama TanTan ramen ($16.50) was interesting. It came with Spicy oil, egg, ground pork, onion, scallion, bamboo shoo, corn and overall it was a very solid bowl of ramen with excellent depth of flavor of the broth. The only puzzling element was the ground pork which I swear tasted like Italian sausage. My wife who had it agreed that it was a bit weird tasting and heavy on the fennel. It didn't feel traditional and while it wasn't bad, it also felt out of place.

Service was attentive and friendly and I look forward to returning and trying out more of their ramen and...

Have been eyeing this place for quite a while since I always pass by and was so excited to try it out now that it’s open.

Perhaps it was because I went there at night but the lighting bothered me a bit. I’m sitting across my friend but the lighting bars are shining directly into my eyes whenever I look across to my friend which hurts the eyes a little. It didn’t help since the aesthetic of the time was black and red. But that’s a small nitpick.

We went there at night, there were a few other customers but I didn’t think it was particularly busy. It took about 15 -20 minutes for our ramen to arrive.

Onto the food, I went with the Tama Classic ramen while my friend got the Tama TanTan. The portions felt rather small. My friend received less noodles than I did, from what I saw.

I don’t think I could reasonably justify paying $16.50 for a bowl of ramen that was average tasting yet small portions. I really had high hopes for the ramen but it just fell flat. Ended up paying $41 (including tips) for two people.

Overall, Tama is a decent place to go to if you are in the area and really want ramen I suppose. They also have a bar but I can’t comment on whether it is good since I didn’t...

Very darkly lit, they take the bar side very seriously, I guess. Red highlights and limited lighting, it was empty at the opening when we came but picked up business as lunch time got busy. Service was okay, a little slow and we often had to wave service over for things.

The fried chicken wings were quite good, I do wish they had a little more of the salt and pepper to sprinkle on because the wings were quite large and middle of the wing ended up just tasting less savory than the start as all the spice was on the outside.

The miso ramen was okay, definitely not as rich in flavor as other places I've been, but the noodle was firm and the mix of corn, seaweed and bamboo was okay. The pork slices could have used a little more grilling to add flavor. I tried a bite of the spicy ramen, it was too spicy for me.

Overall not a bad place to grab some ramen, they actually have a drive-thru available as well... Probably the first time I've seen a drive-thru ramen shop. Needless to say, don't eat ramen and drive...it's...