Tsujita LA

On our recent trip to LA, there was one restaurant that we knew we really wanted to get to. Tsujita LA is a Japanese noodle shop that specializes in a lesser known style of noodle called tsukumen. They have ramen and other dishes, but it's for those noodles that most people go to them (even though the tsukumen is only available at lunch). For fans of ramen, the difference is that the noodles come cool and dry in the bowl. A warm "dipping sauce" is brought out separately, and you dip the noodles into the sauce before slurping them down. 

Char Siu Tsukumen

I opted for the char siu tsukumen which is the basic noodle topped with roast pork. It's the same roast pork you'd find in ramen or Chinese restaurants. M got the ajitama, which was the same as my order but without the roast pork. We weren't really sure what to expect before the noodles came out. Our expectations were of a small amount of noodles similar to what you might get in ramen. But no, the whole bowl was filled with noodles. In the end that wasn't a bad thing since the meal overall was delicious and you got more for the money, but with our plan to eat "two small lunches" this day (more on this when we get to "part two"), we weren't starting off very well. The noodles were thicker than ramen noodles, and they were chewier as well. They had a wonderful bite to them, and they really held the dipping sauce well.

Tsukumen Dipping Sauce

The sauce itself is extremely rich, thick, and salty when tasted on its own, but with the noodles it's perfect. We each got an egg in ours because of the type of tsukumen we ordered, and it was a nice, solid egg white portion with a slightly runny yolk in the middle. It was cooked just the way I like it, but it's not really M's thing. She gave me most of her egg after she ate a little. The sauce is started as a base by boiling berkshire pork bones for at least half a day and is filled with pork pieces, pickled radishes, and scallions. The first bite I had was transcendent. The noodles, because they're cool and chewy, pick up the dipping sauce like it was glue. The saltiness of the dipping sauce is mitigated by the noodle, but the danger is that if you dip too much then it could be a bit too salty. There's a balance that you need to find between dipping too much and dipping not enough.

They explain that tsukumen is meant to be eaten in 3 stages with the first two involving the noodles: dip straight for the first 1/3, add a squeeze of lime for the rest of the noodles. Perhaps we didn't put in enough lime, but we didn't taste much difference with the added lime. (There are also a lot of condiments on the table that you can add to the tsukemen, especially these spicy mustard leaves that were quite hot and tasty.)

Spicy Tuna Don

Before we saw just how big these bowls of noodles were going to be, we also opted to turn my tsukumen into a combo meal with a side order of spicy tuna don added on. The spicy tuna was really tasty. It was nice to get a larger scoop as opposed to just tasting the bit you would get rolled into sushi. M and I agreed that it was a nice break in between the heavier tsukumen. We definitely didn't need it based upon how much food we ended up eating, but it was certainly a very tasty dish. The rice was perfectly soft and sticky and the spicy tuna had great flavor.

Full spread of food

Stage 3 of Tsukumen

So, the third stage of eating tsukumen that I noted above is the "soup" stage. It's optional, but we recommend it if you have the room left in your stomach. They take your remaining dipping sauce and add hot water/broth to thin it out a bit. It's still a touch salty, but it's that good saltiness. Any pork pieces and radishes left over after the noodles are gone add texture and depth to the soup. If you weren't already full after downing a bowl of noodles, you would certainly be full once you finished the soup.

We had a very enjoyable lunch at Tsujita and it was a perfect start to our LA eating adventures. M's favorite part was the texture of the noodles and mine was the dipping sauce. On top of all that delicious food, we sat outside, it was 75 degrees and sunny, and we got to people-watch, which we really like. It was a great meal.