Menderu / 麺でる - Kawasaki

Menderu (麺でる) is a beloved Jiro-kei style ramen shop with multiple locations, centered around the South West area of Tokyo and border to Kanagawa. As with all Jiro inspired ramen shops, they focus on heavy and oversized tonkotsu-shoyu ramen with thick in-house made noodles.

The main shop of Menderu is near Denenchofu station and another location called “Togoshi Kouen” branch near Nakanobu station. Outside of Tokyo, there is also the Sagamihara location, the Tachikawa location and the Tama-Center location. Based on Ramen Database ratings, the Togoshi Kouen branch seems to be the best one. Furthermore, there are 11 listings of closed Menderu shops, which indicates that Menderu used to be a much bigger ramen empire than it is today. Even today, there is a section on their website about franchising, which explains their mode of operation and how you could become a franchisee of Menderu.

I had been eyeing going to Menderu for a while, but somehow never got around to it. When I saw their “garlic ramen” special bowl announced online, I knew it had to be now.

Getting an item called “garlic ramen” at a Jiro style shop is a daring thing to do. It’s essentially deep fried garlic plus the oil it was fried in, on top of a heavy bowl of tonkotsu which traditionally comes with a heaped tablespoon full of freshly minced garlic. Garlic galore. 🧄 🧄

As basically all Jiro style ramen shops do, Menderu offers a range of free toppings which can be modified in quantity to your liking. The classics are the obligatory garlic, vegetables and pork back fat. Additionally Menderu offers fresh onions and karaage, which is is spicy fried tempura dough drippings and not fried chicken. The fresh onion topping was also S tier and I wish more shops would offer it.

The soup at Menderu was definitely what I was looking for: Super powerful, porky, salty, rich. But it was also almost overpowered by all of the garlic aroma. I will definitely have to come back here to try the regular bowl for an impression of their normal soup.

Besides the supercharge garlic soup, I really loved the noodles at Menderu. Surprisingly, they were a real highlight of my visit and definitely stand apart from other Jiro style shop noodles.