Not just the best ramen in Atlanta, but an excellent B-kyu restaurant and café to boot.
I have a soft spot for Atlanta as one of my best friends lives there and is always game for eating out–his fridge is something out of Resident Evil–so over the past few years it’s become a city that I know fairly well. The city is at a bit of a crossroads: the economy is booming, the film industry is everywhere, the the city’s population is growing. Yet the Beltline railine-to-multi-use trail has driven up housing prices and unleashed tensions over gentrification. (I get increasingly antsy every time I visit Home Grown in Cabbagetown and notice the condos that have gone up since my last visit)
Assessments of the city’s food scene evince similar ambivalence. NYT’s survey of Atlanta restaurants last year touched on a number of highlights around the city, such as the Asian restaurants on Buford Highway and the Ponce City Market food hall. But the former AJC restaurant critic Wyatt Williams wrote a scathing confessional decrying the local food scene, describing it as a cynical cash-grab of tasteful interiors but predictable menus and lousy cooking. As someone who was living in a city with a similar dynamic, I was sympathetic. And from a very narrow ramen-only perspective, the Atlanta ramen scene roughly fit Williams’s projection: Yakitori Jinbei was disappointing, Jinya was a very American ramen shop, Okiboru hadn’t opened yet (and has plenty of issues), and ramen options in town had thin-looking broths and not much else.
But I stumbled upon Momonoki–“Peachtree” in Japanese, after the major Atlanta thoroughfare– in a random Google search and was immediately intrigued because of what looked like tonkotsu-gyokai and tsukemen on the menu, even if the former was labeled as “tonkotsu.” This emboldened me to tell my friend to cancel his Corner Bakery lunch plans and brave the midday traffic on Atlanta’s Downtown Connector and Midtown and drive to Momonoki.
The ramen was wonderful. The best part of the bowl was the tonkotsu-gyokai broth: porky to be sure, but the it also contained the flavor and the characteristically slightly sour notes of the gyokai, though one might quibble that it wasn’t as prominent as one might find in Tokyo. On the other hand, it was as rich and thick as a proper tonkotsu-gyokai broth should be, unlike the thin broths that occupy the bowls of far too many American ramen shops. Most importantly, it was delicious. The noodles, which Atlanta Magazine’s Jennifer Zyman said came from Sun Noodle, were somewhat surprising: in keeping with the tonkotsu rather than tonkotsu-gyokai naming convention, the noodles were thin rather than thick, but they were firm rather than rigid in the truest Hakata tonkotsu sense. A thicker noodle could’ve worked a little better, but these were quite snappy and good as-was. The seared pork belly was pretty good, but the lean meat portion was rather stiff, so it needed either more braising, better storage, or same-day preparation. Other components, such as the menma and ajitama, were decent as well.
But Momonoki is not strictly a ramen shop: the majority of its menu is devoted to Japanese B-kyu (B-class) cuisine, which counters images of Japanese cuisine as elegant kaiseki and sushi meals with casual, hearty, carb-heavy fare such as curry rice, okonomiyaki pancakes, katsusando sandwiches, and of course, ramen. According to Zyman, the husband-wife owners, Jason Liang and Ching-Yao Wang, made these dishes and flavors part of Momonoki menu after a heavily-Instagrammed trip to Taiwan and Japan. I’ll feature a more comprehensive overview of other B-kyu menu items in a future Momonoki review (when we visited as a party of four), but on the day my friend and I visited there was a Wagyu Burger katsusando special, so we ordered that and the Fried Chicken katsusando. Both could be accused of being more interesting than tasty–as a sceptic of wagyu burgers, I thought the wagyu burger katsu was a gimmick wrapped inside a novelty–but they were were objectively quite good. Any gustatory disappointment probably owed to the inherent self-contradictory construction of katsusando, where the katsu’s fried exterior is negated by the presence of sweet tonkatsu sauce.
As Zyman intimated, Momonoki has a flair for the chic bordering on the twee, as evidenced by its colorful cuisine, its photography-friendly sun-drenched open interior, and Wang’s scrumptious-looking pastry creations in the attached Momo Café. (More on the café in a future post) But even if years of exposed brick, wrought iron, and Edison bulbs may have inured us to restaurants with self-consciously curated visual charms, Momonoki is the real deal. It has accomplished something that few restaurants have done, even in Japan: terrific renditions of numerous items from the Japanese B-kyu catalog so that there’s something delicious for everybody.
As Ramen:
Q Factor: None (Weekday, 1225)
Sense:Cafe décor, lots of pastries
Price: Momonoki Tonkotsu ($13.50) + Tax/Tip
As B-Kyu Restaurant:
Rating: Strongly Recommended
Dishes: Katsusando are very good (maybe go easy on the tonkatsu sauce), various donburi, karaage, café pastries. But avoid the matcha lemon tart, which is small and overpriced.
