Foodie on Duty-Bonjin

Traveling circuses may be a thing of the past, but what about the concept of a traveling eatery? No, I’m not talking about the Dessert Truck or your favorite empanada cart in Williamsburg. I’m talking about a diner that sets up shop at a select location, serves home style Japanese goodies and then vanishes into the thick of the night?

Welcome to BonJin. It all started as BonJin Café, which specialized in various teas and a highly specialized pre fixe menu featuring marinated tofu with smoked salad, Japanese spring spaghetti and miso carrot soup. It then closed shop to pop up in Greenpoint as BonJin Diner at Eat Records for a string of Thursday nights back in January. This time they served up cheese baked curry and omurice with an Assam tea panna cotta at the back of the cozy records store.

Now, after 10 months of relative silence, BonJin’s at it again – this time at Williamsburg’s Dokebi. Newly christened as BonJin Ramen, BonJin will be rockin’ the noodles every Friday night from midnight to 4AM.

Midnight-4AM. With those hours, it appears that BonJin Ramen will be catering to a very particular kind of crowd: drunk people.

To be honest, I was a little disappointed to hear that BonJin would be serving only one kind of ramen and during that particular time slot. Drunk people aren’t known to be picky eaters and, if able to keep their food down, are willing to eat just about anything. Gone were the specialized pre fixe menus and the delicate play between high-end and home-style Japanese cooking. No homemade cocoa roll cakes with white chocolate filling were to be paired with delicately simple bowls of somen.

So how did BonJin’s ramen fare?

It’s noodles for drunk people. But in a surprisingly pleasant way. What I mean is that it’s got a strong, hearty flavor that is guaranteed to reach the taste buds of even the most inebriated of hipster winos. In addition, there are also a lot of pleasant nuances that the sober can appreciate.

To start, the ramen comes in a large, hulking stainless steel bowl brimming with hot soup and curly, springy and firm ramen noodles. Little niblets of sweet corn and fresh handfuls of mescaline greens top the hearty bowl as well as a slice or two of braised pork belly and needle-thin sticks of fried noodles. The soup itself is thick, salty, spicy and greasy in the best way possible. This is the kind of soup you would want to come home to after too many rounds at the bar.

It’s a tongue-coatingly fat dark miso soup that is based in a heavy, weighty tonkotsu stock. Tonkotsu stock is a thick pork bone broth that takes at least all day to prepare. There’s enough spice to warm the back of your throat, but not so much that the eyes begin to water and the nose begins to drip. This is the type of soup that hangovers wouldn’t want to hang out with. The curly yellow ramen, however, is a great partner for this savory beverage.

The mescaline greens add a sharp and bitingly fresh bitterness to the strong soup base while the crisp kernels of yellow corn brighten up the heaviness of the overall bowl. Then we’ve got the delightfully toasted crunch of the needle-thin noodles on top with that mammoth slice of fatty, melt-in-your-mouth braised pork belly.

Speaking of pork belly, I ordered an additional side of kakuni and some carrot salad to go with my meal. As a side dish, the kakuni is braised in a light broth of soy sauce, sugar, ginger and mirin and showered with slivers of fresh green onion. The slabs of pork belly are glistening with layers of flavorful fat and are barely able to contain their shape. The slightest poke with one’s chopstick will have this specimen fall apart into a mound of juicy pork shreds – it’s that tender.

The carrot salad was also a fairly nice side dish to the otherwise heavy meal. Delicate threads of shredded, juicy carrot are tossed in a mix of rice wine vinegar, sugar, salt and garlic before being dressed in a little bit of oil.

All in all, this is a great meal for both the drunk and the sober. The strength of the miso and pork stock and the thickness of the springy noodles are the perfect wake you up to the fact that you can actually still taste something in your drunken haze. For the sober: the way in which the flavors of the toppings complement one another is, indeed, a good thing. Even better – the very complexity of just the broth itself.

At first it comes off as strong, and only that. But give it some time and some sober palates will be able to ascertain the many different layers of flavors in the soup.