Tuesday, March 17, 2009

Ramen Saves the Day?

Along with frozen yogurt joints, the East Village has been overwhelmed by ramen noodle shops. Ramen shops are the new banks--one on every corner. And now another one is coming...to the corner long occupied by Love Saves the Day.



I don't get the current ramen fanaticism. I understand it's different than the stuff you buy dry at the bodega, but my association to ramen goes to student days, being broke, cleaning toilets for a living, and eating ramen for every meal.

This is how it goes in Newer York: Lose a one-of-a-kind neighborhood institution, gain one more of the many same.

7 comments:

Marjorie said...

wah. genug with the ramen!

i hope LSTD will have a long life in PA. it was one of my regular haunts when i first moved to nyc; i'll miss it desperately as a symbol of the old east village. i still live in the vintage leopard swing coat i got there in 1990. i hope to be wearing it long after the ramen people have departed and the next trendy-trend has taken over -- sliders, bacon candy, maybe vegetable foams shot into your mouth directly from an aeration canister by an obsequious waiter...

Anonymous said...

It's true, cheap is the new chic. I survived college by eating Ramen noodles. I wonder if these restaurants will sell a bowl for 25 cents a serving? One can dream.

JakeGould said...

I think you're being too harsh on the ramen shops. In the great landscape of cheap food in NYC, these Japanese Ramen shops offer a great value and the quality of the ingredients are much better than those 99 cent packs of salt and dried noodles.

Jeremiah Moss said...

there are just too many of them. if there were 5,000 love saves the day shops in the east village, i'd critique them, too.

Jill said...

Whose paying 99 cents for Ramen? It's 25 cents in Chinatown. 33 cents for the fancy stuff.

JakeGould said...

Jill, I used to love scouring Chinatown for cheap packaged food, but after the Melamine contamination in China I don't think it's so great to pay less for food from China.

In fact I work with folks based in China and food quality scares are quite common there.

So not saying a 99 cent pack is inherently better than a 33 cent pack, but I wouldn't trust either nowadays.

hollarback said...

Oh, this kind of breaks my heart. I was just watching "Desp seeking Susan " this week - bad movie, but I watch it solely for the old NY that I used to know. I still have some things I got a LSTD back in the 80s. There is so little of my NY left.

The whole east vill/lower east side these days makes me ill. I feel like that old man in "wings of desire" walking through Berlin remembering what used to be where...

Ugh