Daikokuya Ramen & Ozero Tea & Desserts (Little Tokyo) 7.21.14

So, my friend and I had been planning to get together for awhile to check out the Japanese American National Museum's current exhibition Perseverance.  We finally found a day that we could get together for a museum & lunch date, but, I failed to notice, when I visited the website yesterday that JANM is closed on Mondays. Super sad panda....but hey, there's always lunch to be had, and in Little Tokyo, good eats are never far, so we decided to head over for an early lunch to Daikokuya.

            

(Random street shots of Little Tokyo in LA, because I'm never down here and well, there are beautiful things besides food.)

Daikokuya is an LA-area Ramen chain that was been ranked in Yelp's Top 10 Restaurants in 2011 and is pretty much super busy all the time.  Luckily, we were there early enough to get a seat at the bar without a wait and we quickly ordered two bowls of the Daikoku ramen, which is a pretty standard tonkatsu broth based ramen with chasu (pork), egg, ramen noodles, bean sprout, and green onions:

This was the pristine picture before stirring in the green onions, but you can't really see the goodness of the ingredients, hence...

The less composed picture with the ramen noodles, pork & egg.  Sorry for the shadow in the corner. I probably should have taken more time to compose the shot, but I was hungry. 

So, this is probably the best ramen I've had since returning from Tokyo.  I don't eat ramen THAT often so that's not saying a whole lot, but it was delicious. The broth was savory and delicious, the noodles were just the right texture of firm, the meat was super tender and the egg--OMG, the EGG.  I am not generally an egg fan, but that egg was seriously one of the best things I've eaten in awhile and really made the dish.  My friend thinks that it must have been marinated in something to infuse it with the flavor it had and it was a lovely medium boiled texture so it was cooked all the way through (not runny), but the yolk wasn't firm like a hard-boiled egg tends to be.  It was super good and pretty darn filling.  

Cool Art on the Wall of Ozero

Before getting back in the car for our ride back to her place, we stopped off at Ozero Tea & Desserts where I had a mango jasmine iced tea and my friend had a brown sugar milk tea with boba. 

Mange Jasmine Iced Tea & Brown Sugar Milk Tea w/ Boba

I'm really glad there's not an Ozero around the corner from my house because the mango jasmine tea was pretty addictive--just the right amount of sweet mango syrup blended with a lovely jasmine tea.  When I say, "just the right amount," I mean that the mango didn't over power the taste of the jasmine blossom in the tea which made it really balanced.  I am a stickler for well-made iced tea (a lot of places really overbrew their tea) so this was a nice post-meal treat. 

So, lesson learned--check the hours when going to visit a museum and make sure they're not closed on the day you plan to visit...or don't and have a great meal anyways.