After five days trapped indoors due to sickness, I forced myself out into the wintery world in order to dine with the Judicial Minx. I reached Kinton Ramen early, and after dancing with a stranger at the door to enter, I sat near the back and spent several minutes watching the kitchen work. There’s a cozy familiarity to ramen places for me now that wasn’t there last year.
Ramen has always been “I’ve no money so this is my meal of the day” food, so dining out for ramen always left me with an uncanny feeling, much like finding offal on high end menus. Wandering across Japan last year certainly changed that. Now ramen is comforting, “its the end of another day of walking and I don’t want to think, want cheap beer and soup and noodles and to watch the world go buy” food. A shame the prices jump from the kitchen or in coming overseas, but thankfully that feeling has remained for me.
The Judicial Minx arrives with a wide, excited smile. It’s been more than a few months since last we were able to sit and share a meal. She cleans her sharp, horned glasses as she sits. Within minutes, two steaming bowls of noodles and slaty, savoury, crimson broth are placed before us. Hers has an egg on top whereas mine has slabs of shaved pork, the fat melting into the broth. Chilli pepper, bean sprouts, scallions, and a mound of crushed garlic cover the deep well of twisted, thin, yellow noodles that lurk beneath the broth’s spicy surface.
Excellent food to continue pulling me up out of sickness. Spice to torch anything lingering, fluids to replace everything lost. I have the good sense not to finish my bowl: their conical shape is deceptively deep and filled to the brim.
I save enough room for a black sesame soy milk pudding, which the Judicial Minx stares at with wary longing. Enticed though she is, the soy would witness a horror upon her insides likely similar to the agony I’ve spent the last five days visiting, only compounded overnight. The pudding is pleasant and oddly smooth, a departure from the gritty, granular texture sesame usually imparts. It could’ve done with more than half a teaspoon of whipped cream as topping: the light, airy topping added wonderful contrast, but there wasn’t enough.
The Minx and I are enthusiastically shouted out of the restaurant in now-familiar Japanese fashion, each full and happy, myself with another meal in tow, thrilled to requaint myself over such a hearty, warm meal.
Kinton Ramen
90 Eglinton Ave E #108, Toronto, ON M4P 2Y3