Ramen 101 — Restaurant in Milpitas

Celebrating my child's birthday and the birthday celebrant always gets to decide what they want to have for dinner. He naturally chooses Ramen as his dish of choice every year. Unfortunately, this year, his favorite ramen restaurant and chain is no longer in Northern California. After taking him to several alternative spots, we ended up coming to Ramen 101 which I expect is named after our famous highway 101, as the fourth option after these others failed good qualifications. This is a small ramen shop located in the McCarthy ranch shopping area. It does not have much seating and appears to be a combination ramen and Hawaiian BBQ place. I ordered the tongkatsu ramen and asked him to make it as spicy as possible with a side of agadashi tofu. When the bowl came out, it came out very quickly. I don't think I waited more than 5 minutes. My partner ordered a barbecue rib plate which took about 10 minutes to come out. The agadashi tofu took about 15 minutes to come out and they brought each one as they were completed. When my soup came out I had asked to make it as spicy as possible and noticed it didn't seem spicy so asked if I could get some extra spice. The waitress gave me a plastic container of hot sauce which I immediately put into the soup. Typically, I do not taste test hot sauce before I add it in, something I probably should do because not all hot sauces are created equal and there is something to be said about trying the soup and broth in its natural state before you decide to add additional flavors. At any rate, I poured it in and began to eat. There was nothing wrong with the presentation of the ramen. It's what you would expect with nothing particularly special. My first taste of it was that it was okay. However, the more I ate, I noticed that there was this flavor that I am not particularly fond of and realized that it was numbing sauce. Those of you who are fans of eating Chinese Asian noodles will instantly know what this numbing sauce is. It is a common flavor in popular Chinese noodle houses and is a very unique flavor. This is the first time I've ever had a ramen bowl that is classically a Japanese noodle dish that uses numbing sauce as it's hot sauce. Not being a fan of the numbing sauce, this instantly took me out of a moment for my ramen experience. To be very fair, this is not the fault of the establishment. However, from my rating and ranking, it didn't help. Doing what I could to taste the natural ramen and broth flavor underneath was hard to get past the numbing sauce so my experience was mediocre. Being unsatisfying, I even declined to finish drinking the soup after eating the meats, additives and the noodles, the numbing sauce contaminated it so much that I had no desire to finish the broth. A bad sign for me and noodle soup. The agadashi tofu came out piping hot. It also came with dipping sauce. Unlike other agadashi tofu that I've had, this one was dry as opposed to being in a soup or broth and it was okay. I think I prefer the version that is submerged or partially submerged in its sauce versus the dip version.

In the end this was not one of my better ramen experiences. If I went without the hot sauce it could have been different, but I should say that my child (22) also felt it was... Ok remains to other ramen he has had.

Try it for yourself to know. Be warned about the hot sauce. For me, I will not likely be back but I don't ding the establishment for this. I just don't think it...

It's a nice clean restaurant kind of place you can take a date. But not overly fancy. I was really surprised at how terrific the food was. I had the black garlic noodles and I had a chicken katsu dish with also some extra chicken. I'll kind of wanted to try both and they took care of me. I also had a side dish of a bunch of shrimp dumpling.

The katsu is actually the best that I've ever had. It's a tough trick to get the flavor just right but at the same time have the outside coating be super crisp without being super thick and without also over cooking the internal chicken but they really did it. The uncoded chicken that I tried was also very tender almost melted in your mouth lots of flavor but not too much. The macaroni salad was pretty good the rice was perfect but I would expect that.

The ramen just exploded with flavor very garlicky I had never really had black garlic so they had recommended it so I'm glad they did there's a kind of a strange light burnt flavor to it but it all just really works. I was worried that the pork roll was going to be rubbery but it just melted in my mouth so I was pretty happy. Also forgot to mention that the vegetables that came on the Hawaiian plate were perfect. Most of the time that's something I wouldn't eat because it usually was disappointing. Shrimp rolls had real shrimp in it and what I liked about the barbecue pork bun was that it was a very juicy with the char sue sauce which I like. I don't want it all dry in the middle. I recommend it I think you get a lot of food for the money and when you get the food it's really good.

Update I've been here about four times and it's been excellent and consistant every time. This place is also priced along L&L BBQ and it's...

My husband and I have been coming here for a few months, in between Instacart orders at Walmart. We usually arrive between 8 and 9 and have plenty of time to eat before they close at 9. The last time, I ordered for both of us and then sat down. They apparently didn't want us to eat in the restaurant, because they passive aggressively packaged our food to go even though I had ordered it to eat in. This time, we arrived at 8:30 -- plenty of time to eat. We placed our order and then were told it was too late to eat in the restaurant and the order would have to be to go. We told them that if they weren't going to let us dine in, they could cancel the order. And that's what they did. They lost two loyal customers when they decided we couldn't eat there even though they were still open for another half hour. All of the above being said... The food is pretty good. My husband usually gets tonkatsu, and I get either chicken or miso. The chicken karaage is usually fresh, hot, and delicious. But the kids who work there need to learn about...