To celebrate my brother's birthday, we decided on Momofuku Noodle Bar because of its young and festive atmosphere. A cousin from Manila, Kuya A., was also visiting with us, which is always a good excuse for eating out.
Despite it being only a Wednesday night, it was quite a wait for us since we had a rather big group. We popped by a cozy bar right across the street for a drink before our party was complete. And so finally we did get called and it was time for some good eatin'.
Kuya A. and DJKung decided on the tasting menu, while the rest of us went for a la carte. What follows is a mish-mash of what we had.
This was the first item on the tasting menu. (Side note: We did not take good notes of what we had this night, unfortunately. I know that this excuse was quite lame, but we actually had been imbibing in quite a few drinks since early that evening, and continued to do so the rest of the night.) I'm going to decide that this was a little pickle something to wake up your palate.
I think that one of the reasons why the Momofuku brand became popular is because of the quality of the ingredients that they use. The pork here tastes really porky, and I believe that they do use the the heirloom-type breeds of pigs raised in happy 100%-natural farms and all that. Further, this is one of the places where they do fusion food right; the kitchen has a good feel of what flavors and textures and techniques go well together.
Pork steamed buns app. This is a sandwich version of siopao, or Chinese meat buns. These were quickly scarfed up.
This is the second item on the tasting menu. Can you hazard a guess? I distinctly recall that the red pastes at11 o'clock and 3'oclock were fruit-based.
Here's one of the side dishes that we ordered. I looked at the menu listed on the website, and cannot say for certain whether these were the Tokyo turnips. I do recall that these were a little crunchy and simply delicious.
Smoked chicken wings. DJKung especially liked these.
Halfway down the Momofuku ramen bowl. The ramen broth here is quite tasty.
Chilled spicy noodles. This is a play on the Korean style cold noodles with pepper sauce. This is topped with cucumber, half of a soft boiled egg and some toasted nori strips. Among the noodles were crunchy-salty-sweet nuggets of fried cashew nuts, which were awesome.
Instead of the sweet-spicy red pepper sauce, the noodles are bathed in an intriguing spicy, porky and silky dressing. Yet remarkably despite all its porkiness, it did not have a greasy feel at all.
Third item on the tasting menu was the beef ragu with pasta. DJKung remarked at how gamy (in a good way) the beef was.
Maple syrup ice cream. This was very creamy and salty at the same time, which was a kick-ass combination. It was too bad that we were all quite full by then and could not finish this.
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