Kyuramen x TBaar opens in Garden City

The Starbucks of ramen? This new Garden City restaurant certainly doesn't act like it. Kyuramen's food showcases way too much skill and attention to detail.

The entrance from the parking lot is more like that of a boba shop selling fruity jelly teas and delicate crepe cakes flavored with green matcha and purple yam. The chic Japanese dining room is a minimalist space dominated by light wood lining the tables and bar, and geometric shapes that look like a cross between a teepee and a giant squid. These private tatami rooms are what Kyuramen is known for. During the pandemic, this Queens-based chain shined with its unique design sense that included outdoor private rooms and booths stacked on top of each other in the shape of a beehive. 

The chain's founder, Gary Lin, told Gotham Magazine in 2020 that he wanted to create "the Starbucks of ramen," and this seems to be panning out, as Kyuramen is quickly expanding across the U.S. with eight locations in New York alone. The downtown Garden City spot is the first for Long Island. It opened in early April together with its sister business, TBaar tea shop, which incorporates its drinks and desserts into the menu. 

Most of the ramen bowls can be ordered as combo plates with a pork bao and a drink: Thai iced tea or "amazing lemonade" with a cucumber mint flavor. If you want to order the omurice — which you definitely do — the combo plate is mandatory. 

What is omurice? If you haven't seen the runny scrambled egg omelet on Instagram, you may remember it from the vagabond cooking scene in the cult classic "Tampopo." Originally a homey breakfast dish served to children, the omelet and ketchup fried rice was given gourmet treatment in the 1985 comedy, and is now a food worldwide phenomenon.

You don't see it just everywhere, because omurice takes a lot of skill to make. Using a very hot pan, the chef cooks the outside of the omelet while scrambling the inside, quickly shaping it into an egg submarine with a runny center. The finished omelet is placed over an oblong dome of fried rice and split in front of you at the private table, so that eggs spill out over the top in dramatic fashion. The server then pours a thick brown demi glace from a gravy boat all over the top, and also onto a freshly fried loaf of crispy pork tonkotsu. If you're the kind of person who isn't scared of some yolk, it's really good. 

The ramen, available in nine varieties, delves into regional styles like Kyushu in the south, the capital city Tokyo and Hokkaido in the north. Kyuramen prepares an 18-hour bone broth and uses a multiday process of cooking and freezing its chashu pork, to produce a fatty exterior with a solid center. The chain also serves curry ramen as well as Korean kimchi ramen, and a MEGA ramen with shrimp and chashu.     

The chicken ramen ($16.99) was balanced and delicate, decorated with plump corn and thin wisps of scallions that wrapped around the grilled chicken and added some zing to the light broth.

The multilayered crepe cake arrived at the table brimming with fresh green matcha powder.  Cakes like this are arduous to make, as the baker must layer dozens of crepes and rich cream on top of each other to create the whimsical finished product. Even doing this once is quite an achievement, so if Kyuramen can figure out how to bring a crepe cake to every neighborhood, all the more power to them.    

Kyuramen x TBaar, 988 Franklin Ave., Garden City. It's open 11 a.m. to 9:30 p.m. Sunday through Thursday and 11 a.m. to 10:30 p.m. Friday and Saturday; 516-385-8887, kyuramen.com

By Andi Berlin

andi.berlin@newsday.comAndiBerlin

Andi Berlin is from Arizona and does not know where she is going. But when she gets there, she’ll find something beautiful and delicious that the world needs to taste.