Strings is a Ramen shop in Chinatown located at 2141 South Archer Avenue. It’s between new Chinatown and old Chinatown and when we went there were not a lot of people so we got to pick our seat. We sat by the windows and looked over the small menus. My friend has given up most meats for a bit so she had some difficulty picking something that would go with her diet. The first thing we started off with was drinks, I asked them about it because the only drink listed on the menu was ramune. I love ramune but I think I really just wanted tea or water or to try something new. I ended up with a melon soda. My friend ordered a strawberry ramune. If you don’t know how to open a bottle of ramune (essentially a type of japanese soda) the workers can be of help.
The ramen is broken up into four categorizes based off the broth. I ordered the Shio Ramen which is a chicken, turkey and sea salt broth. It came with scallion, binishoga, narutomaki, and a boiled egg and my option was turkey so I got turkey meat in it. My friend picked as her base the Shoyu Ramen which is a clear soy sauce broth with bonito fish, menma, scallion, nori, and bean sprout. She loved it and said she was surprised she liked it so much. I enjoyed mine as well. Though there were cases where I found little hard bits, mostly towards the bottom which may have been a odd piece of sea salt but felt more like bone gristle maybe from the stock. I didn’t find them until I was almost done, so I wasn’t as upset or disturbed by it, it just kept me from finishing off the rest of the broth. When they brought us our ramen they offered to bring us something to add to add spice to it and we both decided against it. They also told us to mix everything up, which we did and one of the menus said that we should slurp loudly as it is a compliment and that it shouldn’t take too long to eat all of the ramen, about five to ten minutes. I think we failed at both, I couldn’t really make any noise even though I tried and we were too busy chatting to finish within such a short amount of time (though we could have, I wasn’t watching a clock).
Overall I liked the Strings Ramen Shop. I think it would be an awesome place to go to on a cold winters day.