TracyFood

Restaurant remembrance: Mitae Ramen, Costa Mesa, CA 11 September 2007 9:29 pm

Posted by Tracy in : eating, restaurants, reviews , trackback

Over dinner last night Peter told me some sad news: Mitae Ramen has closed. According to his sources, the lady who owned it died a few years ago, and the food and business had suffered ever since. I am glad I missed its decline and fall, and happy to remember Mitae as one of our favorite places to eat in Orange County. The following is a slight reworking of my old Everything2 writeup on the subject.

Mitae Ramen was a small Japanese restaurant located at 750 Saint Clair Street, in Costa Mesa, Orange County, California. (For locals: just off Bristol Street, close to the big freeway triangle where the 55, 405, and 73 don’t quite intersect.) The food was cheap, the servings generous, and the service pretty quick. Their sushi was kind of mediocre — though, to be fair, I was entirely spoiled by the excellent Hapi Sushi in Laguna Beach — but then again, the place wasn’t called Mitae Sushi, now was it? No. Mitae was for soup and noodles, and in this area it did not disappoint.

Those of you who know ramen only as the prepackaged just-add-water noodles available in most American supermarkets and the staple food of college students are in for a surprise, and I can think of no better place than Mitae Ramen to receive this revelation. Real ramen involves a combination of noodles and broth, yes, but there’s a lot more to that broth than salt and rehydrated soy sauce extract. It comes in a huge bowl (bigger than my head!) with vegetables and meat and miso, depending on what kind you order. And that’s just the default. There are lots of other potential toppings: boiled egg, tofu, corn, butter, and wakame seaweed as well, all available at Mitae for a small additional charge. On many occasions, I enjoyed the shoyu ramen (made with a traditional dashi-type stock) and miso ramen at Mitae, and both were excellent for under $7.

The really excellent meals, however, were the combinations, which usually involved (duh) some combination of salad, an entree, fried or curry rice, gyoza, inari, and/or a small portion of California roll. Entrees included chicken teriyaki, beef teriyaki, yakisoba, ramen, and — joy of joys, hiyashi soba. Ordering the latter combo meal would result in my receiving four pieces of California roll and an enormous plate of delicious cold soba noodles in the vinegary sauce of my dreams, topped with raw cucumber diced into matchsticks, strips of omelette, slices of that weirdly sweet red-edged meat that turns up in Japanese food from time to time (char siu or chaasu; barbecued pork), and ringlets of green circled onions, with a healthy dollop of wasabi on the side to spice things up as much as you like. It’s fantastic. You could add a bowl of miso soup if you absolutely needed something warm, but I couldn’t finish the entire plate last time I ordered this.

Back in the day (literally six years ago now), the most expensive item on the Mitae menu was a sushi special for $9.99. Other specials included vegetable and shrimp tempura, crunchy roll and/or California roll, or a halfsize order of shoyu ramen with crunchy roll (the latter very nice if you were looking for just a little bit of sushi). In addition to the hiyashi soba I praised so highly earlier, there were a few other cold dishes: chicken salad over cold noodles, tofu salad on cold noodles, and hiyashi chuka (chicken, tomato, cucumber, corn, and wakame) on cold noodles. All meals included pickled cabbage and iced tea, but Mitae also had a liquor license, so you could have sake or beer with your meal, if you so chose.

Goodbye, Mitae Ramen. I will always remember you fondly.