I meandered between the buildings of Sky Park Business Center in Irvine, wondering if I was misunderstanding the address given for Shimamoto Noodle. I called the listed number.
A ramen master answers the call
“Do you want to eat here?” Keizo Shimamoto asked after answering. “Just place your order from the site and sit at one of the tables in front of Smart Kitchens,” he said, referring to the multi-concept restaurant space where I now saw customers drifting in and out, picking up burritos and Hainan chicken rice and pork-bone soup with shrimp and fish balls. “I’ll bring out your food in a proper bowl.”
This was my introduction, on a hot Tuesday afternoon, to Shimamoto’s peerless ramen.
I am admittedly late to his virtuosity.
Plenty of food obsessives know Shimamoto’s name through his 2013 viral creation: the Ramen Burger, his much-tweaked take on a dish he’d tasted in Tokyo (a patty dripping with sauce and sandwiched between a squiggly “bun” made from fried noodles) after years of exploring the subject writ large on his Go Ramen! blog and living in Japan for four years to work in ramen shops.
The Ramen Burger debuted at Smorgasburg in Brooklyn the same year Dominique Ansel introduced the Cronut at his SoHo bakery in Manhattan. Shimamoto’s face beamed on talk shows and the Food Network. His trademark dish wound up at the center of a new era: the age of the mashup social-media sensation, an out-the-gate checklist item for dining-culture vultures to wait hours in line for and status-post on their feeds.
Keizo Shimamoto’s famous Ramen Burger, photographed in the Sky Park Business Center in Irvine where Shimamoto Noodle operates.
(Bill Addison / Los Angeles Times)
Often obscured in the ruckus was Shimamoto’s devotion to ramen beyond any engineered burger form, studying and mastering noodles and broths based on the innumerable variations he’d eaten across Japan.
After regular Smorgasburg appearances and pop-ups across the city (and beyond, including for hundreds in Torrance), he established a takeout window in L.A.’s Koreatown with his brother, Jeffrey. Then headed back to New York and, in 2016, settled down behind a counter in a commercial kitchen in Queens he called Ramen Shack. He served classical ramen (porky rich tonkotsu, shoyu and shio with their soy-blasted bases of chicken stock and dashi) alongside riffs involving truffle oil or vegetarian almond-milk stock. Burgers veered into teriyaki-pulled-pork or grilled-pineapple territories.
Ramen Shack ran for three years. Sho Spaeth, an authority on ramen whose cookbook “Homemade Ramen” was a James Beard Award finalist this year, wrote an article for Serious Eats in 2019 titled “Saying goodbye to the most exciting ramen restaurant in the country.” He cited Shimamoto’s dedication to constant improvement, and imagined Ramen Shack influencing American ramen culture for years to come because Shimamoto “showed it was possible to produce representative examples of a range of ramen styles.”
Shimamoto, who grew up in Southern California, returned west with his family. It was big news, reported by Food reporter Stephanie Breijo, when he decided to open a Ramen Shack in September 2021 in San Juan Capistrano. It closed nearly a year later, with Shimamoto mentioning kitchen staffing challenges and personal health issues.
Keizo’s noodle, pine mushroom and dungeness crab at Restaurant Ki in Los Angeles.
(Myung J. Chun / Los Angeles Times)
Fast-forward to 2025, when I was dining at Ki Kim’s extraordinary Restaurant Ki in Little Tokyo and reeling over the incredible noodle course. Who was custom-making the delicate, springy strands that wind through Kim’s concentrated Dungeness crab stock? Shimamoto. Of course I’d heard of the Ramen Burger guy, but this was my first chance to finally appreciate his masterwork.
What to order in Irvine
So here he is now, hidden in an Irvine business park. He’s staged pop-ups now and then, including a reappearance of the Ramen Burger at Smorgasburg L.A. in May, and some summertime trial runs in Orange County. The menu is succinct: four or five bowls of noodles, the burger in beef or vegan options and a couple handsomely packaged take-home ramen kits.
Keizo Shimamoto in front of the Smart Kitchens commissary space in Irvine where he operates Shimamoto Noodle.
(Bill Addison / Los Angeles Times)
If you care about ramen, this is probably worth a drive from anywhere in the region. Have I eaten through every ramen shop in Southern California to tell you this is definitively the best? No. But anyone who’s gone in search of ramen excellence should lock Shimamoto’s artistry in their memory.
Start with his favorite, shoyu ramen. A union of seasoned chicken stock, dashi, tare (soy sauce bringing the umami intensity), niboshi (dried sardine) oil, thin noodles with the subtlest bounce, ovals of pork belly chashu, menma (fermented bamboo shoots) and clusters of deftly sliced scallions and spinach. Purity. Harmony. I wish this had been my first-ever bowl of ramen, so I’d have the right baseline by which to judge all others.
Negi shoyu ramen prepared by Keizo Shimamoto at Shimamoto Noodle.
(Bill Addison / Los Angeles Times)
His wife and brother love the negi shoyu ramen, a chile-spiced variant scattered with smoky-charred scallions and chopped chashu.
If I could only eat one bowl again, after memorizing the shoyu, it would be the Quiet Storm, Shimamoto’s riff on a style that combines tonkotsu (the thick, milky pork broth that was everywhere during the throes of last decade’s ramen zeal) and gyokai, a seafood broth that slices through tonkotsu’s bluster with a flinty sort of minerality. It’s cinematic, this tension and chemistry.
To experience a thicker, chewier noodle, order the tsukemen (dipping-style ramen) with a broth, as dense as gravy, fusing the essences of pork, chicken and fish.
Yes, I tried a Ramen Burger. I asked for it to be brought out last, after slurping through the proper bowls. I was full but still wolfed the whole thing down, compelled by how the noodle bun collapsed into scribbles on the tongue, and how the narcotic saltiness of the shoyu sauce urged one more bite and then another. It dripped down into my lap and I didn’t much care.
The burger is great. If you arrive with the appetite to focus on one dish, I’d recommend prioritizing a bowl of ramen. That’s where the circa-2026 genius lies.
One gleans from Shimamoto’s social media posts that another attempt at enterprise makes him anxious, even if he also feels almost duty-bound to share his mastery. Which is to say two contradictory things: This may be an ephemeral experiment that disappears without notice, so go when you can, but also maybe let’s not all show up this weekend and exhaust the man. It’ll be safest to check Instagram for updates. He operates every day but Tuesday, with shorter lunch-focused hours on Saturdays and Sundays so he has time with his family.
This go-around, may Shimamoto’s enterprise flourish into something this singular craftsman can sustain, and all of us can value.
A noodle pull, just for fun, from a bowl of Quiet Storm ramen made by Keizo Shimamoto in Irvine.
(Bill Addison / Los Angeles Times)
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