RESTAURANTS : Slurp! Ramen for the Discriminating

It’s been hard to escape the instant-ramen manufacturers fighting it out on prime-time television in competition for supermarket shelf space. One company even packages the Japanese noodle soup for the large Latino market using the name “Caldo Presto” (quick pot). By now, however, Western ramen enthusiasts know that there’s much more to ramen than dehydrated noodles in a foam plastic cup.

Our ramen consciousness was raised by “Tampopo,” the Japanese film that achieved blockbuster status with foreign-film aficionados. We salivated as we watched its heroine--a noodle-shop proprietress--slaving to perfect her soup base, training with a stopwatch to get her noodle cooking time down to the last millisecond, and arranging fresh garnishes as if each were part of a museum-quality presentation. We observed the ramen cognoscenti and the reverence with which they could contemplate each slurpy strand.

With more than 100,000 ramen shops in Japan, this obsession with the fine points of noodle preparation is critical to ramen-shop survival. The competition isn’t as stiff in Los Angeles, but we do have a discriminating ramen audience, many of whom you’ll find at Yokohama Ramen in West Los Angeles.

It’s not surprising that a shop serving regional ramen variations--even going so far as to fly its fresh noodles in from Japan--should settle here. Although it might seem an unlikely location, West Los Angeles has been a Japanese enclave since the 1920s, when it was settled by Japanese farmers. More recently, the presence of Sanwa, Mitsui and Sumitomo banks are hard to miss. Yokohama Ramen’s owners, Kimi and Hiroshi Kanemoto, make the families of these bank’s newly arrived business people feel at home.

Yokohama isn’t just a name the Kanemotos picked out of a hat for their restaurant. Yokohama, the bustling Japanese trade center just south of Tokyo, is where Chinese immigrants introduced their noodles to Japan. And it was there that lo mein became ramen --at first, noodles were prepared in the authentic and robust Chinese tradition, but later, enterprising noodle vendors lightened their style to accommodate the tastes of Japanese customers.

At Yokohama Ramen, customers can bone up on ramen lore and lingo by tasting hiyashi chuka , yakisoba and chanpon ramen . For these Japanese renditions of Chinese dishes, the shop uses either nama (fresh) ramen or the thicker wheat noodles called chuka soba (Chinese soba)--the only noodles served by ramen shops. Purely Japanese noodles like udon and buckwheat soba noodles are sold elsewhere.

Yokohama’s printed menu is a pale shadow of what the cafe actually serves. Many offerings are written on place mats on the wall and there’s a daily blackboard special. One day, the special was a chicken and vegetable stir-fry; I was surprised to find that even a mundane-sounding dish like this could have a special flair here. A man sitting next to me was eating “cold noodles with special sauce.” His ramen, a bouquet-like arrangement of slivered ham, spicy sprouts and garnishes, was one of the prettiest ramen presentations I have ever seen. Two different sauces came on the side. He alternately dipped a few noodles into each, swirling them around to soak up plenty of the liquid. The accompanying bowl of rice sprinkled with sesame seeds might seem like a bit of carbohydrate overload to Westerners.

As you wait for your order at one of Yokohama’s sunny tables, you’ll hear the unmistakable thump of chef Kanemoto’s wire basket against the huge vats of noodle cooking water. There’s a lot to like on this menu, but my two favorite dishes are the Kyushu regional specialty, chanpon ramen , and ja ja men . Chanpon ramen’s soup, a long-simmered broth of chicken and bones, is rich and milky. Its bountiful seafood topping includes baby clams in the shell, barely cooked vegetables and Chinese mushrooms. In complete contrast to this hearty yet delicately seasoned bowl, the ja ja men is ramen with a zingy and peppery miso-laced sauce--one of the spiciest items I’ve had in a Japanese restaurant. These noodles are slightly resilient--as they should be--but they soak up sauce and broth wonderfully because, says chef Kanemoto, “noodle flour in Japan is softer with less gluten. American ramen companies can’t get the correct flour--that’s why we import our ramen.”

Ramen purists might order shoyu ramen in Tokyo/Yokohama-style soup, a dish that illustrates what the fuss over a good broth is all about. It’s rich but not cloying or greasy, flavorful but never too salty or “enhanced” with MSG (see article below). On the other hand, Yokohama’s mabo ramen , a spicy stir-fry of pork and vegetables over noodles, is a house invention and not usually seen anywhere in Japan. Yakisoba , or grilled noodles, another fine stir-fry, will introduce you to the thicker chuka soba noodles.

Yokohama City is also famous for dumplings, and its regional bento lunch boxes always include shumai . The dumplings I ate there, though, weren’t nearly as good as Yokohama Ramen’s house-made shrimp shumai, plump balls of minced shrimp with the thinnest translucent covering. And the hand-formed gyoza dumplings are gingery and grilled to a turn.

It is true that Yokohama Ramen is much more convenient than my favorite Tokyo ramen shop. But that’s only one reason why I like it best. This noodle shop, like its Chinese predecessors, has adapted--this time to West Los Angeles tastes: There’s Perrier on the beverage list.

Yokohama Ramen, 11660 Gateway Blvd. (south of Pico at Barrington), Los Angeles, (213) 479-2321. Open Wednesday-Monday, 11:30 a.m.-9 p.m. Recommended dishes: ja ja men, $4.50; Yokohama seafood ramen $4; chanpon ramen $4.20; gyoza, $2.50.