Yuina’s favorites—Random ramen encounters in Shinsaibashi and Tennoji

Hi, I’m Yuina Deguchi from the idol group NMB48. What kind of food do you like? I absolutely adore ramen! Because I’m in the entertainment business, I can’t eat it everyday, so when I do it feels like a special occasion. I treat it like a special food reward to myself.
Here are 3 Osaka ramen restaurants that I have completely fallen in love with.

Enchantingly dark soup at IKR51

IKR51 is located on the first floor of a building just a few steps outside of the Shinsaibashi-suji shopping street. It’s easy to find if you look for the white bricks and red lantern hanging in front. When you eat here, you can get a fresh sashimi bowl and ramen together!
Seafood and ramen aren’t the most common combinations. So it’s pretty unusual to find the two together in the same restaurant.

Originally this restaurant served seafood and specialized in salmon roe. But at some point, ramen became the popular item on the menu. So I’m sure the salmon roe and raw sea urchin is delicious. (In fact, the restaurant name IKR an acronym for ikura, aka salmon roe. Just like how the NMB in NMB48 stands for Namba.)
I wanted to try some of the seafood bowls, but I held off this time. I came for the ramen, so I went with the “Dried Oyster Black Soy Sauce Ramen” because black soup ramen is always so impressive.

The shine on this black soup looks heavenly!
The rich color of this tamari soy-sauce based soup is so enticing. Just look at it!

I started with a bite of the noodles.

They were chewy, with a good body, absolutely delicious!
As soon as I put them in my mouth I could smell the aroma of oysters and soy sauce melting together. The soup stock is made from a perfect balance of oysters and jidori chicken.
According to the owner, “If we were to use raw oysters, the soup would become cloudy, so we dry them first, marinate them in soy sauce, and then dip them in oil.”
It requires a lot of time and effort on our part to make this soup so clear and beautiful!

The pork and chicken char siu are both delicious, but you definitely have to try the king trumpet mushrooms that are sauteed in butter! IKR51 puts them in their ramen in place of the more traditional menma (fermented bamboo shoots).
The stir-fried mushrooms have a crunchy texture and are absolutely addicting.

I’m so curious about the salmon roe bowl and the tonkatsu with eggs too. No matter how much I wanted to eat more, I just couldn’t. I’ll have to come back again later to try the other things on the menu.

Eye-catching charsui at The Ramen War

Next, I took a walk north along the Shinsaibashi shopping street for about 6 minutes to get to The Ramen War. The restaurant is located about halfway between Shinsaibashi and Honmachi.
The Ramen War actually has four restaurants in Osaka, and each store has a slightly different concept, which makes it fun to enjoy their food in a totally different atmosphere. The Semba Shinsaibashi location is designed in a “Western-style cafeteria” theme. It’s surprising how much it doesn’t look like a typical ramen shop. It’s really stylish!

They serve something called the Pistol, which has tons of pork charsui covering the edges of the bowl.
You can choose from between 1 and 5 pieces of impressive char siu, but I definitely recommend you get the maximum of 5 pieces! It looks gorgeous, and it’s thinly sliced so it’s easy to eat, even if you’re a girl like me.

This bowl looks so good in a photo! I see how it got to be such a hit after people posted it on social media. The charsui is made from rare pork imported from Italy that is almost like eating proscuitto.
You can eat it straight to enjoy the flavor of the meat as it is, or dip it lightly in your soup broth like a shabu-shabu hot pot. There are 5 pieces, so you can eat it a few different ways in one meal.

The noodles here are house-made with one goal in mind, to be firm enough that 100 out of 100 people will come away saying “those noodles were chewy!” And the soup is a Kansai-style soy sauce based broth made from shellfish. However, I have no idea what kind. That’s one of the shop secrets!

The soup is light enough that I could eat a bowl of this every single day.

Exotic salts build unique flavors at SiO Style

Italy, France, Australia, and beyond… Did you know there’s a ramen shop in Tennoji that collects rare salts from around the world?
It’s exciting just to see all the stylish packages lined up.

The most popular dish among the ladies is the special SiO lemon mazesoba noodles. They’re cute and delicious!

First, you squeeze the lemon.
I used my chopsticks to keep my hands clean. First you stick a chopstick into each end of the lemon, then twist them around and voila!
Of course, you can also squeeze the lemons by hand! Then you give it a thorough stir to get all the flavors combined..

Now you’re ready to eat. Itadakimasu!
The fresh lemon scent compliments the salty umami in this dish so well.
It’s refreshing, but the soup is creamy, almost like something that would come out of an Italian kitchen! Plus the noodles have the perfect aroma and balance of salt.

Once you’ve enjoyed the original flavors, try adding different salts and black pepper to change the taste.
Each table is stocked with 6 different “salts of the week” that change weekly.

When I ate here, there was a British salt with an amazing smoky aroma!
The shop owner recommended I try the Australian salt with beautiful pink crystals.
Each salt is unique and I really want to try them all. If you ask the staff they will bring you a different type of salt too, so if you have a specific salt you want to try, please ask.

The location is easy to get to via Abeno Walk in Tennoji/Abeno. It’s on the 1st floor of Abeno Q’s Mall, which is a very popular spot in the neighborhood.
It was absolutely delicious! I added some rice to the leftover soup in my bowl to finish the meal, which filled me right up. And they will give you a second round of noodles if you are a student. So be sure to bring your student ID if you want to top off your bowl!

I’m so happy that I got to eat so much ramen because it’s one of my favorites.
All the shops I visited were very clean and were the kind of restaurant that was easy to enter, even for a single woman like me!
I think I’ll come back to these restaurants with the other members of NMB48 next time (^^)♪
Of course, don’t be shy if you’re a guy. The ramen here was delicious and the portion sizes were big.
No matter who you are, these are the types of shops you’ll want to bring friends and family!

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Yuina Deguchi

I’m a member of the idol group NMB48 from Osaka. Someday I hope to be a food reporter. I love to eat so you can find more of my favorite restaurants and foods on my social media accounts. Or look for my hashtag #ラビグルメ
X (Twitter)：@yuina_laby
Instagram：@yui_laby0622
TikTok：@yui_labygurume