Midtown Lunch

I think it’s safe to say that Sawtelle Blvd, in West L.A., has become the ramen capital of Southern California.  While practically every neighborhood in Los Angeles now has a decent ramen option, Sawtelle has practically every ramen option all on one street.  Want to eat the best bowl of Tonkotsu ramen or tsukemen dippings noodles in the city?  Go to Tsujita. Want a pork fat infusion from the place that held that distinction before Tsujita, and has better rice bowls?  There’s now a Daikokuya on the strip.  Infamous Jiro style ramen, with fatter noodles? Tsujita Annex.  Soup-less ramen?  Tatsu has you covered.  And if you long for the days when L.A. didn’t know what a great bowl of ramen tasted like, there’s always the throwback assari-kei ramen at Asahi where you choose between shoyu, shio, or miso (although you’re probably better off driving the extra 3 miles to Santouka.)

So where does Shin Sen Gumi, the Gardena based hakata style ramen chain with locations in the SGV, Fountain Valley, and Little Tokyo, fit in to all this madness? When they opened up Downtown their only competition was Daikokuya, making it an easy sell.  But their newest location just opened on the little extension of Sawtelle just north of Santa Monica, blocks away from some of the best ramen in the city. Here are 5 reasons you’d want to end up at SSG…

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One can’t help but feel like there is a full scale ramen invasion going on in Los Angeles right now.  Jinya attacked the woefully unoccupied Valley and Mid City territories, while Yamadaya took their Torrence army north into a Westside previously dominated by Santouka– and will soon dispatch another force to Westwood, where Wakasan is the only ramen lunch to be had.  We are all eagerly awaiting Tsujita’s first move in West L.A., and even Hollywood seems to be under fire.

But none of those battles compare to the throw down that is about to take place in Downtown L.A. Love it or hate it, there is no dispute that Daikokuya is the best bowl of ramen in DTLA. But now that Shin Sen Gumi, a Hakata style ramenya with locations in the South Bay and San Gabriel Valley, has opened up an outpost in Little Tokyo that is all totally up in the air.

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