海里捞面将其“令人兴奋的’ ramen to a new S.F. restaurant

They plan to re-create the pop-up at the restaurant, cooking a multicourse Japanese menu that ends in various styles of ramen, from XO paitan to a yuzu-shio ramen that was recognized at the World Ramen Grand Prix, a ramen competition in Japan.

Look for pop-up favorites like deviled ramen eggs topped with crispy chicken skin and poached chicken with a chile paste made from 14 ingredients. The Tans make several kinds of ramen, including a triple miso ramen that’s cooked for 15 hours and mixed with made-from-scratch dashi and garlic-infused chicken schmaltz. For dessert, which is Yoko’s realm, there’s always Japanese dorayaki: small, fluffy pancakes with seasonal fillings like strawberry and custard or lemon-infused whipped cream.

During the shutdown, they periodically offered to-go noodle kits and sold jars of mala chile crisp. A recent kit featured abura soba: brothless tsukemen noodles coated in shoyu tare (a concentrated soy sauce), dashi, roasted alliums and Wagyu fat with Wagyu chashu.

At the restaurant, they’ll be able to expand the menu and work with ingredients that weren’t feasible for a twice-monthly pop-up in a home kitchen, like high-end uni and whole fish that they’ll break down to make a Cantonese-inspired steamed fish dish topped with hot oil.

“We’re focused on getting better ingredients and being able to serve all the things that we’ve always wanted to serve but couldn’t because we couldn’t make it work for whatever reason,” Clint said.

The ramen will get a boost from a special Japanese water filter that Clint said high-end kaiseki and sushi restaurants use in Japan. It extracts more impurities, resulting in clean, soft water with a pH level that mimics the human body’s, Clint said. Making broth from the water is “night and day,” he said, creating a clean but umami-rich broth. “You’re tasting exactly what you’re extracting from your stock.”

The other distinguishing element in their ramen is the noodles from Shimamoto Noodle Inc., whose owner Keizo Shimamoto became known for ramen burgers at his popular Ramen Shack pop-up in New York City. With Shimamoto, the Tans have created custom noodles for their various ramen styles, tweaking thickness, flour ratios and gluten levels to yield the desired mouthfeel and taste for different dishes, like a thick, chewy noodle for the abura soba and a thinner, more refined noodle for the shio.

The noodles are “paramount,” Clint said. “They changed every single ramen dish. It’s the closest thing to noodles in Japan that we’ve had. That’s always the big thing we notice every time we go back to Japan ... the noodles are always the differentiating factor when you compare to the ramen here.”

The couple had been searching aggressively for a space during the pandemic, which forced them to shut down the pop-up temporarily. Pre-coronavirus, they hosted intimate meals in their Daly City home with small groups of diners slurping ramen in their dining and living rooms while they cooked in the open kitchen just steps away.

“I couldn’t see us going back to doing events at our house as an option,” Clint said. “We just decided if we want to stay here and live here and raise a family here, we needed something legit.”

The Tans, both self-taught chefs,started Noodle in a Haystack in 2015after Clint fell in love with the art of ramen in Japan. The pop-up became immensely popular, with tickets selling out quickly, but they never sacrificed a meticulous attention to detail and commitment to bringing superior ramen to the Bay Area. (The pop-up got its name from a ramen blog he started when he returned to the Bay Area called “Noodle in a Haystack,” because to him, the search for excellent ramen stateside was akin to finding a needle in a haystack). Chronicle food critic Soleil Ho called the fried chashu one ofthe must-eat dishesof 2020 and considers the ramen “mind-blowing” in the Bay Area scene.

While they’ll be able to serve more people in the new space, they still want to keep things small. The Tans don’t plan to hire any staff — like many restaurants in Japan, it will be just the two of them in the kitchen. Noodle in a Haystack will serve about six courses and offer two seatings per night for no more than 12 diners each. The restaurant will serve dinner four nights a week initially, though it might open for Japanese curry at lunch or offer a dessert pop-up focused on dorayaki.

“We’ve been doing it in our living room for so long. We’ve had so many people that we can’t cook for, that we’ve had to turn away. We feel good that we’ll be able to do it the right way,” Clint said.

They hope to open Noodle in a Haystack in August. While they’re remodeling the space, they’ll continue to sell takeout noodle kits out of the restaurant. They also launched aKickstarterto raise money for the restaurant.

Noodle in a Haystack. Opening August. 4601 Geary Blvd., S.F.noodleinhaystack.com