Liberty Noodle feeds the eye with clever minimalist elements, but the flavour in the ramen soup is MIA.
Liberty Noodle
171 East Liberty St., Toronto
416-588-4100
$60 for dinner for two with wine, tax and tip
I love ramen. Actually it goes much further than that. I have rarely met a noodle I didn't like, and since soup is my all-time favourite food, I find the combo of noodles and soup irresistible. Hence my love affair with pho.
The Vietnamese do pho, the Chinese do noodle in soup, we Jews do chicken noodle soup, and the Japanese do both ramen and udon. Hungarians beef up soup with dumplings which, being farinaceous, are close kin to noodles. So many cultures make a meal out of noodles in soup because it's fabulously cheap, the ultimate comfort food, and a great way to add aromatics to noodles to bump up their flavour.
Then there is the encyclopaedic span of noodles without broth - from Chinese chow mein to pad Thai, with stops in between for mac 'n' cheese and the Italian pasta lexicon. Noodle restaurants, of course, are ideal for opening in a recession, thanks to their friendly price point. And they're always ideal for the restaurateur because they offer a delectable profit margin
Liberty Noodle, brought to us by Arshad Merali, a partner in the perennially cool Blowfish, is the trendy new take on a ramen shop. Ramen is a meal-in-a-bowl of meat or fish-based broth often flavoured with soy sauce or miso, always brimful of fresh noodles and then topped with sliced pork or chicken or anything else the cook has around. Doing it well seems simple.
When ramen is bad, it's usually because, as my Boba used to say: "They waved the chicken over the pot." It's all about the foundation of a well endowed stock. Which Liberty Noodle has apparently not figured out. They claim to be riffing on ramen rather than aiming for pure authenticity, but whether you're riffing or religious about ramen, it shines or sinks based on its basic building block, the stock. In the case of Liberty's stock, taste is MIA.
Many other things they have figured out. No menu item tops $12. It's a tall spare room with blonde almost-wood tables and a big open kitchen, full of clever minimalism: The eye is entertained by different levels - of tables, of chairs, of the three rooms. A glassless "window" from one room into another, its frame showcasing a wall made of small rocks. One small room with wonderful red-orange walls. A cute little open elevator going from one level to another. Even the tea is a design statement: Various green teas come in traditional Japanese black iron teapots, to be poured into small round double-walled glasses - so hot tea feels cool to the touch.
The menu is a compendium of Japanese noodle house classics with some re-writing, and wildly inconsistent execution. Crispy shrimp and calamari almost are, though their breading is somewhat heavy. Their promised wasabi and coriander dipping sauce looks the part - it's pale green - but neither wasabi nor coriander make themselves known to the taste buds. Beef tataki is barely seared beef in delicate ponzu sauce with piquant dressed daikon slaw.
Black and white noodle salad is a clever play on colour and texture, thanks to the white (cold ramen noodles) and the black (noodle-shaped wild black mushroom threads) all jazzed up with more wild mushrooms and enough green onion, sesame and sweetened rice vinegar for pizzazz. Prawn and cucumber noodle salad has the fun flavours of chili and sesame with a hint of mint. Gyoza dumplings are blessed with translucent wrappers and credible curried chicken filling.
Then there's the ramen. Some might think ramen ought to be the cornerstone of a Japanese noodle house. They would be sadly disappointed at Liberty Noodle, where the broth in the ginger chicken ramen is thin and borderline sour. Its innards are lovely - lots of moist chicken with good ramen noodles - but we want the broth sweet, rich and mellow, which this one isn't. Equally unappetizing is the hot and sour ramen, its broth far too spicy, with precious little flavour to back it up. Superbly moist sliced chicken breast and fab al dente noodles don't fix it.
Anything not-soup is better at Liberty. A dish called garlic and garlic is impeccable ramen noodles tossed in garlic sauce made from garlic cooked long and slow enough to bring out its creamy sweetness, and topped with fried garlic. But would that they had flash-fried the garlic when we ordered, because this garlic has been sitting a while, and gone soggy. Lemon pepper shrimp is better, and 10 bucks is easy on the exchequer, but it remains a sophomoric stir-fry of shrimp with bok choy over white rice, however nicely dressed up in sweet and hot chili sauce.
For dessert one evening we ask for black rice pudding. Our server claps her hands and says: "Oh good, I'm so glad you ordered that." Why? "Because it's the only dessert we have tonight." No crème brulée. No tokyomisu, no mochi ice cream - despite their presence on the menu. The pudding is dry black rice with mysterious green custard. It has a dried out lid but no trace of the advertised coconut flavour.
All of which makes us wonder (again): Where do the citizens of Liberty Village wear their taste buds?