SOJO Ramen — Restaurant in Fremont

My wife and I decided to settle with Sojo ramen having seen many people wondering around this shop for lunch.

The inside is nice and dark. We sat down and started ordering from their menu. Once I saw how the menu is printed, man, can't they do better job on pictures in the menu? It definitely doesn't look professionally made and the way the ramens were listed were a little off.

Both my wife and I were a little concerned as to how the food would go in reflection of the menu. We ordered the black garlic ramen.

And...

The ramen was to our surprise extremely well prepared. The broth was thick and the soup has a heavy garlic base to it. This was probably one of the BEST ramen in Fremont I've had. As a lover of ramen myself, the broth is everything. Unfortunately, a lot of ramen shops in the area uses similar broth base universally made. It won't make it taste bad, but there's nothing special about the broth either.

It definitely felt that the owner and the cooks of Sojo Ramen took the time to fine tune the broth and it shows once you eat the ramen. I give it: 5/5

We got a side of okonomiyaki, that was okay. 4/5

The food took a while but it was worth it. We will be back.....but that menu though...a word of advice, get some professionals to take some real photos and do away with the old school bowls on the old pictures. ...

This was my first time coming to this ramen place, and to be quite fair and honest... It was mid. Nothing unique or nothing special about it, to be quite fair.

Food: 3.5/5 The food was honestly kinda eh - at least for me. My whole family can say otherwise. The size of the bowl for $12.95 was not really worth it -- there wasn't even bamboo included, and the chicken cutlets were an extra $4 each, which easily adds up to almost $20 for a whole bowl. My parents got the tofu noodles, and the texture was pretty good, but the soup was still pretty salty when we had already asked for "less salty"....

Service: 3.15/5 It was good, but we would have appreciated it more had the staff actually paid attention to us more, in terms of requests and all that. We had to explain ourselves twice in terms of clarification, which I did not want to do as a customer.

Atmosphere: 2.6/5 It felt rushed; there were other customers who hit into my chair and never really apologized for it. Nothing much to say here because this restaurant really showed any appealing things.

Would I come back here and bring friends to this restaurant? Probably not.... Good place for an afternoon snack, but if you're really hungry like I was tonight, probably not the...

Since I crave ramen, I decided to order from Sojo Ramen last April since I had good experience last time pre-covid. But this time I was totally disappointed. I ordered for pick up: Black garlic tonkotsu, butter miso tonkotsu, and chicken karaage. The order was ready on time when I arrived.

When I got home, I was shocked to see that the ramen I ordered only include broth, noodle, chasu & green onion! I thought last time they gave us bamboo shoot & black fungus as well. Wow! I checked back to ordering system and saw that each additional topping is $1! Honestly, I'd rather a bit more and have at least some toppings on my ramen than cheaper ramen with only noodle & chasu. Another disappointment was the broth that tasted off (had some fishy taste). I thought maybe it was because of the black garlic oil but the miso broth also has off taste.

The most heart wrenching thing is that the itty-bitty portion of $6 chicken karaage! It was totally not worth the price! The 6 pieces were teeny tiny like half of regular size chicken nuggets!!! And they were obviously overcooked and tough.

The only good thing was the chasu. At least they gave us 3 decent slices and they were tender & flavorful.

With lots of good ramen around, I won't...