Ivan Orkin, one of Tokyo’s most celebrated ramen chefs, still has a 718 phone number. He grew up on Long Island, cooked at Mesa Grill and Lutece, lived in Park Slope and now spends lots of time in Westchester with his family. And he plans to open a restaurant in New York within the year.
But for now, he’s having a good time being huge in Japan. When we asked Muneki Mizutani, editor of Tokyo food magazine Dancyu, how he knows Orkin, he says, “Everyone knows Ivan. He’s famous.”
There are, after all, thousands of Tokyo ramen shops, but there aren’t many chatty white dudes stirring the pot. But even more than that, there are thousands of Tokyo ramen shops, and most of them aren’t great. Orkin’s two Ivan Ramen eateries (in Roka-koen and Kyodo) offer deeply satisfying bowls with tender fatty pork, thin toothsome noodles, a perfectly runny egg and a rich broth that’s the soul of the dish. Orkin’s standard soup suits the traditional Japanese palate well. It includes a mix of chicken stock and dashi, a seaweed-heavy base that’s all about umami.
But Orkin, a chef who likes to play around and who spends a lot of time reading and thinking about what restaurants all over the world are doing, enjoys riffing on ramen, too. He’s made a Mexican ramen, using chilies for his base, that he’s quite proud of. He’s created limited-edition instant ramen for convenience stores including Circle K. And he’s playing around with a pork fat ramen. “No soup, just fat,” he says. “I’m getting ready for New York!”
In the meantime, though, he’s the ideal guide to dining around Tokyo. And while he makes great recommendations, eats with us and even takes us to a coffee shop where he starts talking to the proprietor about Stumptown, he also emphasizes that Tokyo is so vast that nobody has anything close to a comprehensive list of where to eat. Even the chain restaurants are good here, he says, and exploring on your own is a big part of the fun. This is a man who will wake up on his day off and then take a 45-minute train ride to try a bowl of curry he’s heard about.
We absorb his advice and philosophy as we eat around Tokyo for a week. Here are our highlights:
The Shangri-La hotel, towering above Tokyo Station in the high-rent Marunouchi district, can make you feel like you’re floating on top of the world. The rooms, with $10,000 beds actually designed to make you feel like you’re floating, are on the top 11 floors of a 37-story building. We dine on the 29th floor at Nadaman, an outpost of a fine-dining chain (not at all an oxymoron in Tokyo) where we eat sea urchin chawanmushi egg custard and almost absurdly delicate wagyu beef.
But when Orkin finds out about our temporary perch atop Tokyo Station, he tells us to head for the bottom. Connected to the station, in one of Tokyo’s seemingly infinite underground dining and shopping areas, is Ramen Street. This basement destination, which expanded in April, has outposts of eight prominent ramen shops. We arrive hungry one late morning (people start lining up for each restaurant even before 11 a.m. opening time) and try two newcomers: Shichisai’s thick noodles with big hunks of pork and Honda’s deconstructed ramen, which we mix ourselves. Both are fantastic. We’re now completely hooked on ramen. We’re sad we don’t have room for another bowl.
Tokyo makes it easy for visitors to hit one location and sample different chefs specializing in the same kind of food. The best example is the Tsukiji fish market and the hundreds of restaurants and seafood stands surrounding it. Guidebooks urge you to show up by 5 a.m. But Orkin correctly notes that unless you want to see the tuna auction or eat at one specific spot, you don’t need to arrive so early. And with so much fresh fish around, feel free to just sit down wherever you like for your sushi breakfast and/or buy a hunk of tuna to go.
The Club of Tokyo Famous Curry Diners is just a 15-seat stand at an underground food court in Yurakucho, but it serves curries from five restaurants. There’s a sampler plate that allows you to try all five, with Japanese curry alongside Ethiopian-, Indian- and British-style dishes interpreted by Japanese chefs.
Tokyo is a food-focused culture. Many department stores offer multiple floors of eateries, with even more food in the basement. On a recommendation from Orkin, we gorge on more wagyu at Imahan, an outpost of a high-end beef chain inside the Takashimaya store in Shinjuku.
For katsu, the fried pork cutlet that’s a Japanese staple, we visit Tonki in Meguro. By the time it’s open at 4 p.m., there are more than 20 people in line. What looks like it could be three generations of cooks stir huge vats of boiling oil and plate cabbage and rice as the crowd waits for the first batch of breaded pork.
For yakitori, grilled meat and vegetable on skewers, we hit Yakitori Hachibei in Roppongi, a favorite of Orkin’s. We’re dazzled by the enoki mushroom, quail egg and pork belly skewer, and it’s fun to sit at the bar and watch food cook on charcoal a couple feet away.
At Wakiya (yes, the same restaurant that failed at New York’s Gramercy Park Hotel) in Akasaka, we learn three important things. 1. As Orkin, who joins us for lunch, says, Chinese food in Japan is really good. 2. Spicy dandan noodle soup is sort of like a cross between traditional Szechuan dandan noodles and ramen. 3. When you order it at Wakiya, you can keep asking for portions until you’re satisfied.
After Wakiya, we hop on the subway and Orkin helps us walk off our second bowl of dandan noodle soup by taking us down side streets in the ultra-luxe but also hipster-friendly Omotesando shopping district. We arrive at Omotesando Koffee, in a tiny and totally charming shack that seems to come out of nowhere, like a secret Zen garden around the corner from shops selling $4,000 Danish watches. The coffee and baked custard squares are great. Orkin, clearly excited, chats with the proprietor. Along with all these Japanese words we can’t understand, we hear Orkin say Stumptown and Blue Bottle and Intelligentsia. The guy making our coffee can’t stop smiling.
A day later, Mizutani takes us and Orkin to dinner at Kotaro in Shibuya, a district known for a youthful crowd, nightlife and its “love hotels.” The hard-to-find, speakeasy-style Kotaro is an izakaya, technically a drinking establishment with food. But anybody who’s eaten around in Tokyo knows that the food at many izakayas is truly serious.
Chef Kotaro Hayashi, a dashing young man who coincidentally just ate lunch at Ivan Ramen, is excited to have Orkin in and asks if there’s anything we don’t eat. We say we eat everything, and our bluff is called. “Is horse OK?” We try fatty raw horse meat, which looks a bit like pork belly and has a mild taste. But it’s chewy, so you can’t help but linger on the fact that you’re eating horse for the first time.
We‘re in no hurry to eat horse again, but the meal overall is astoundingly good, from the raw fish to the mustard-y potato salad to the fried pork meatball to the thick, long house-made noodles. Kotaro also serves us the same sake at three different temperatures, and it tastes different each time.
Orkin is giddy when the food starts coming out. “Isn’t this fun?” he asks, beaming.
“There are so many chefs like this doing their own thing at places like this,” adds the New York veteran who cooks in Tokyo, so proud to be part of a food scene with no limits, in a city so dense that hidden gems seem to be around every corner and also underneath the ground beneath your feet.