Kitakata Ramen Ban Nai - Irvine — Restaurant in Irvine

If you plan on coming here, you'll want to add yourself to the Yelp waitlist as soon as it becomes available or be prepared to wait! Knowing this, we arrived around opening and was seated at the bar after waiting for about 10-15 minutes.

Boyfriend wasn't feeling like eating ramen that day, so he opted to get the Pork Katsu Curry in the Large size (+$3.00) which totaled to $19.00. Kitakata's housemade curry is medium spicy and for us, a littler saltier than we liked. It balances well when you eat with katsu, but not so much when eaten with just rice. Boyfriend was little disappointed that upgrading to large only increased portions for rice/sauce and not an additional piece of katsu.

I decided to get the regular Mixed Boiled Vegetable Shio Ramen ($14.45), which consisted of pork broth, blend of shio/shoyu base, 5 pieces of toro chashu, cabbage, bean sprouts, carrots, spinach, green onions and Asian chives. The noodles were springy, bouncy and a little thicker than your typical ramen noodles. Broth was perfect! This may be my go-to choice from now on.

We had a small hiccup with our order where the sizes were swapped on our selections. Fortunately, the kitchen was swift in getting that corrected by providing extra rice/curry sauce and did not upcharge for the large ramen. It was really appreciated that they were quick on the resolution and we left very...

Full marks. The shogun of ramen. The name is a dead giveaway as to which style of ramen you are getting, and yes there are many styles of ramen. This particular style comes from Kitakata in the Fukushima Prefecture (if my geography serves me) and features a more Central Japan style fare with a lighter more balances flavor profile and a distinctive flat and squiggly noodle.

The flavor balance is authentic and critically with a quality stock you can pick out the layered flavors. You can also tell the noodles are freshly made with the best consistency when you bite into it. You may notice the noodles don't leach starch into the soup and the soup retains its clarity and flavor density to the very end. That is the hallmark of quality and attention to detail.

With their fatty pork the richness is offset by the delicate flavor profile while avoiding the heaviness of this particular fatty cut. That takes talent and dare I say a few trade secrets to accomplish consistently.

This place actually edges out Santoka Ramen, a rich authentic Hokkaido Northern Japan style ramen which gives this place a run for its money and would tie if not for the extraordinary lightness is this broth which is amazing considering it is pork based.

Overall...

It was our first time coming to this ramen shop and we were excited to try it. Unfortunately we had a very poor experience. It’s way overpriced, and service felt very disorganized and impersonal.

We placed our order, the server confirmed our order and everything was correct, but when the food landed they mixed up our soups and I ended up with the Gluten free noodles and my friend with gluten sensitivity got the regular noodles. As this was our first time here, it took us a minute to realize, we confirmed that we ended up with the wrong plates, my friend explained he had a gluten sensitivity and one of the servers asked if he’d like a new one, and the answer was yes. 15 minutes go by and there’s no sign of a new dish coming, so we ask again and they hadn’t even started it.

If you order the gluten free noodles expect your soup to be more like a noodle dish rather than a soup. They put way too many noodles in leaving very little room for broth. Also, we couldn’t get a straight answer on whether the GF noodles have egg in them.

Overall our experience was very underwhelming and we decided to try many other places before coming back, unfortunate as we...