600 11th Avenue, Inside Gotham West Market (44th street and 11th Avenue; map); ivanramen.com Setting: Upscale food court Must-Haves: Smoked white fish donburi, slow-cooked pork donburi, chili eggplant mazemen, classic shoyu ramen Service: Food court-style self-service, but the cashiers are friendly and the food comes out wicked fast. Compare To:Yuji ramen Recommendation: One of the most unique and delicious ramen shops in the city. Unashemedly inauthentic. A must-visit.
Ivan Ramen's Slurp Shop is open, and it's good. Really, really good.
When my friends first moved to the far western edge of Hell's Kitchen a few years ago, there were nothing but fancy new apartment complexes, street vendor warehouses, and lots of cabs to take the folks who lived in those fancy apartments to neighborhoods worth visiting. But that was before Gotham West Market opened its doors a few weeks ago, serving up lunch and dinner food court-style. It's got a few high-profile tenants like Brooklyn-sandwich shop Court Street Grocers, a Spanish tapas joint called El Colmado, a burger joint called Genuine Roadside, and a few others.
But wander through the open communal seating throughout the complex and you'll notice one thing: almost everyone there has a bowl of ramen in front of them. It's not surprising given the amount of hype that Ivan Orkin has been building up through various pop-ups and events around the city for over a year now. Slurp Shop, as the Gotham West Market outpost is named, is the first and smaller of two shops he has planned for the city, his first two restaurants since opening up his now-legendary Tokyo back in 2007.
Interior.
Here's the thing about ramen in Tokyo: it's post-adolescent in a way that hasn't quite hit New York yet. It's gone through its phases of authentic rigor and regional stylistic adherence and has become what, say, pizza has become here: a framework. A canvas for which to work upon (don't believe me? Just check out what's going on with our community-submitted pizzas each week). That's not to say that there are no standards. Just as a wildly inventive pizza built on a flawed crust is going to fall flat, no amount of creativity can rescue poorly crafted noodles or broth lacking depth and technique. Ivan Ramen's thin, slightly wavy noodles, made by Sun Noodle (a.k.a. the Pat LaFrieda of noodles) using Orkin's recipe, cook in about 40 seconds and come flecked with bits of rye flour. They're consistently bouncy and fresh, an impeccable base to build a bowl on.
Rye-flecked noodles
The last great ramen rush in New York was all about the pork. Joints like Ippudo and Hide-chan made rich, creamy tonkotsu broth the standard. It's not until the last year or so that we've been dipping our feet into craziness that is modern ramen. Yuji Ramen brought us Italian pasta shapes made with ramen dough dressed with small dollops of wildly inventive sauces. Bassanova brought us the signature green curry ramen from their Tokyo shop. Slurp Shop goes even further astray, while still riffing on classic flavors, both Japanese and New York.
Classic shoyu ramen with added egg.
Glancing at the menu, you might not notice a few familiar items. Classic Shoyu Ramen ($13) is probably the most traditional of the lot, though it's a stretch to call it "classic." The broth base is similar to those in the other soups, made with a combination of chicken broth and dashi which then gets flavored with a soy sauce-based tare and a drizzle of flavored fat. It's lighter and more delicate than most ramen broths I've had. The bowl comes topped with a slice of slow-cooked pork chashu and a tangled nest of scallions. It's a solid, comforting bowl, but not the star of the show.
Vegetarian shoyu ramen
A vegetarian version of the shoyu ramen ($13) is more interesting, with a strong stock flavored with mushroom and seaweed along with a slick of what chef Mike Bergemann calls "vegetable fat,"—oil flavored with their house soffrito and seaweed.
Classic shio ramen.
Classic Shio Ramen veers even further off course, with a stock that's darker than you'd expect for a traditional shio (my Japanese mother even asked if we got the right dish after seeing its appearance). It's served with a dusting of powdered katsuobushi, the dried smoked bonito that is used to make dashi and is often served as a topping for tofu or rice. It's one of Ivan Ramen's signature moves and adds an intense umami smokiness to the dish.
Pork chashu.
If you want to bulk things up, very lightly marinated soft-boiled eggs can be added for a couple, as can an extra slice of pork belly chashu ($3). The pork belly comes served as-is, with none of the torching or grilling action you get at some other ramen shops, but it's faultlessly juicy, rich, and well seasoned. The most interesting add-ons are slow-roasted plum tomatoes ($2, Ivan Orkin might have found the only good use for those roast tomatoes that get pushed aside on a full English breakfast platter) and a chili garlic oil ($1) which is heavy on the garlic and light on the chili.
Roasted garlic mazemen.
Speaking of garlic, you might have read Brian Koppelman's short paean to the Roasted Garlic Mazemen ($13), which is probably the most talked-about dish at the restaurant, but not its best. Served in a near brothless style that Orkin invented at his Tokyo joint, the noodles instead come dressed in an intensely flavored sauce with a creamy texture. It's similar to the Triple Garlic Mazemen that I tasted at a dinner a couple months back, though the slurp shop version is missing the balance that pickled garlic brought to that dish. I miss that pickled garlic.
Roasted garlic mazemen broth.
Occasionally the broth can also be too creamy. With ramen, eating the noodles while they're still hot is always vitally important for their texture, but in this case, it's actually the texture of the sauce that suffers: If you don't get to the bottom of that bowl within a few moments of having it delivered to you, it thickens up into a starchy, almost paste-like consistency that plasters the remaining noodles together. On one occasion, the noodles came served in a bowl that was cool enough to thicken up that sauce before I even got halfway through them. Better bowl-heating would go a long way in smoothing out this occasional inconsistency.
Chili eggplant mazemen.
Of the noodle-based dishes, the most interesting—and my favorite—is the Chili Eggplant Mazemen, which goes the furthest into straddling the fusion line. Eggplant is slow-cooked in a tomato-based soffrito until it melts apart into a rich, noodle-coating sauce with plenty of flavorful oil added to the mix, making the dish something like an abura soba. The scallions on top come dusted with what looks like Japanese togarashi, but is actually smoky powdered chipotle peppers.
Slow-cooked pork donburi.
If there's one complaint that can be made about the ramen, it's the portion sizes. These are moderately-sized bowls that come sparsely adorned. Extra eggs, chashu, and toamato can bulk things up a bit, but Ivan Ramen is never going to be the kind of place where you can leave stuffed with a single serving of noodles.
If filling up is your goal, you're better off looking towards the Rice Bowls ($12 each), which I'm going to declare as the strongest part of a strong menu. Slow-cooked pork shoulder comes shredded in a rich, sweet and savory sauce served on top of rice seasoned with a puree of umeboshi (salt-preserved Japanese apricots flavored with purple shiso) and wasabi. Those slow-roasted tomatoes sit on top, along with some more of that flavorful oil.
Curry rice.
Curry Rice ($12), a Japanese lunch counter staple, comes served with a big sprinkle of lightly pickled radishes. Rather than a standard roux-based curry sauce, Slurp Shop makes their with a smooth puree of cooked cauliflower, apples, and other vegetables, leading to a lighter texture. Despite the strong taste memory, there was something lacking here—I longed for the super-soft chunks of potato and carrot Japanese curry typically comes with, and found the shaved ribeye to be an odd choice of protein. It's not a bad dish, but not as strong as the other rice options.
Smoked whitefish donburi.
That takes us to the Whitefish Donburi, one of the most surprisingly delicious things I've tasted all year. Has anyone done Jewish-Japanese fusion yet? (Yes, but still.) It starts with a warm rice base tossed with homemade furikake, a Japanese seasoning blend used to flavor rice. Their's has the standard sesame seeds, nori, and sweetened smoked bonito flakes, but augments it with ground fried onions. The rice comes topped with slivered cucumber, scallion, flaked smoked whitefish, and a dollop of salmon roe.
Stir it all up and each bite brings you a crazy burst of flavors and textures: sweet bonito flakes and crunchy fried onions coat bits of crisp cucumber. Hints of smoke come through from the whitefish, which melts into the rice. Salty salmon eggs burst against your tongue. It reminds me of the simple breakfast my Japanese grandmother used to serve us of white rice with jarred furikake and grilled cod roe, but with better balance, more excitement. (Sorry grandma.)
Negi salad.
The rest of the menu is comprised of a couple of sides: an excellent sweet-and-tart Negi Salad with pickled cucumber and scallions, and some eggplants in thick gravy that is tasty if a little stodgy.
Sweet and spicy eggplant.
It thickens up similarly to the garlic mazemen if you don't down it fast enough. For drinks, you have your choice of a refreshing yuzu lemonade, which is wisely mostly lemonade with just a hint of yuzu, Japanese barley tea (which I wish were brewed a little stronger), or the "Ivan Palmer," a 50/50 mix of the two.
I chatted with Ivan briefly after one of my meals (he floats around the dining room chatting with patrons in a very Paulie Gee-like way) and talked to him about the more exciting menu items, that whitefish donburi in particular. Good news: according to Ivan, the larger menu at his soon-to-open East Village shop is going to be greatly expanded in the realm of these unique Jewish-New York-Tokyo-style dishes.
If we've already dipped our feet into the craziness of modern ramen, Slurp Shop marks New York's first headlong dive, and it's fitting that a Jewish guy from Long Island is bringing it to us, leaving authenticity far behind in the dust.
First up is “Monodon Narhval" — a Narwhal — which is… colored correctly! It’s also a huge tadpole-like creature with what appears to be a lateral line, spiracle above its eyes, and one mysterious ventral fin.
Next is “Balaena roſtrata" — a Northern Bottlenose Whale. I guess the shape of the beak is roughly correct. For some reason the dorsal fin appears to be backwards and a few streaks of white have been applied at random. And what’s going on with that fully-body cellulite?
Finally is “Delphinus Orca"… apparently an Orca. The shape looks suspiciously similar to a Rondelet illustration from two centuries before, although the coloration looks a bit modern-ish. There also appears to be an anal fin and second dorsal fin.
A Harvard University student accused of sending fake bomb threats will be going home after a federal judge ruled Wednesday, Dec. 18, that he may be released to the custody of his family.
I would like to think that, on Google Reader, and on ThOR, we can do better than the rest of the internet in this regard
So that leaves us with the stories that don't make it. These are the articles and essays that have fallen into the valley of ambiguity – reports on important scientific findings with difficult-to-interpret results, political news with a long and tangled back story attached, and opinion essays that require us to account for points of view that may be unfamiliar or strange. There is no satisfaction in knowing that the Higgs boson has sort of been found, but sort of not. And nobody wants to risk alienating friends with a piece of opinion writing that might or might not be offensive – you're not even sure.
Who wants to share a story that can be misunderstood?
Not only does student participation decline dramatically throughout the new generation of Web-based courses, but the involvement of teachers in online discussions makes it worse.
The French have shut down yet another English word: "sexting" will now be known as "textopornographie," with "sexto" as the noun "sex text." France's General Commission on Terminology and Word Invention (or Commission Générale de Terminologie et de Néologism, s'il vous plaît) decided to change the word, as it has done since 1635 in an effort to protect the country's language from all words ugly and devoid of Frenchness. Tech words and regular words alike have been changed over the years: back in 2003, the country changed the word "e-mail" to "courriel," and earlier this year our beloved "hashtag" was banned and replaced with "mot-dièse," which translates to "sharp word" in English. Here are some other terms the French have made fancy:
"LOL" was replaced with "MDR," which stands for "mort de rire," or "dying of laughter"
"Spam" e-mail is "pourriel" in Québécoise French
"Podcast" was changed to "baladodiffusion"
"Chat" became "clavardage"
The "knockout game," the ridiculous phenomenon where someone slaps or punches another person in the face on camera, became "vidéoagression"
Next on the agenda? If we're lucky, maybe "selfie" or "twerking."
It’s not just because Winamp (with an assist from Mandy Moore) set me on the path that led me to become head of design at the streaming music service Rdio. It’s also because Winamp was a key part of what it was like to come of age right at the end of the millennium (and first tech bubble).
In 2000, I graduated from high school and used the gift money to buy my first personal computer. I bought my first car, a Honda Civic. My shitty rock band recorded and released its first (and final) studio album. What would become my professional career also began: I wrote my first line of HTML, built my first website, downloaded my first MP3 from Napster, and fell in love for the first time with a software application. That would be Winamp, of course.
In 2000, most Windows and third-party applications felt impenetrable, but Winamp felt real. It had soul. I remember thinking, “Whoever made this has to be a musician.” More specifically, they had to be a guitar player. It looked like my Rat distortion pedal or Boss DD-3. I wanted to turn every knob, press every button. My digital music collection was a junkyard of random MP3s and ripped CDs, but Winamp whipped it into something that made sense.
In 2000, most of the websites I designed resembled brochures or posters or gift cards — digital approximations of the era’s conventions. Simple navigation through predictable sitemaps. Home, About, News, Contact. Javascript, specifically, AJAX, hadn’t yet brought the Internet to life. One page would load. You’d “CLICK HERE.” The next page would load. Websites weren’t used, they were visited. So I created glossy onscreen brochures and business cards embossed with rollovers. That was about as interactive as things got, especially if you skipped the Flash intro.
The more I used Winamp, though, the more interested I became in its design. When I found a message board full of custom Winamp skins, I realized that anyone who could create graphics could create a skin. It lit a fire.
That fire kindled into a Winamp skin celebrating my then-celebrity crush: Mandy Moore. If my muse was lackluster, the work was anything but. I was solving problems and thinking about users, not visitors. Each pixel had power. Every icon had purpose. Form and function blurred together in wonderful, wholesome harmony. Designing websites felt like something I had inherited or borrowed from the Print Generation. This, however, was mine. Winamp was teaching me product design.
I guess it was only natural that I wound up designing products that play music. The other day, I fired up some Mandy Moore for old time’s sake. Then I searched every hard drive, every backup, every corner of my tiny digital empire, trying to find the PSD for that skin. I couldn’t. But then, I didn’t really need to, because I’m still designing that same skin more than a decade later. Only this time, it’s for Rdio.
Jessica Williams talks to John Tamny, columnist for Forbes
P.S. He’s an asshole
If you haven’t seen the whole segment, find a way to watch it. It’s truly worth it for how much Jessica Williams exposes his ignorance and privilege in three minutes.
Unfortunately on the tolerance and diversity front. But you've never really arrived as a new community in the US before you show up in the right-wing paranoia-sphere.
For those of you following our discussion of Pope Francis's decision to remove arch-conservative Cardinal Raymond Burke from a key Vatican council charged with vetting would-be bishops for the Pope to appoint, check out this article. It's from the National Catholic Reporter and gives a feel for the backdrop to this move. The general thrust is the depth of entrenched institutional opposition to the Pope's proposed reforms of the Curia and particularly how vocal Burke himself has been in second-guessing the direction Francis is taking the Church.
Earlier this week we showed you Rivendell made out of LEGOs. Today it’s Minas Tirith and the Battle of Pelennor Fields done in candy. It’s a few years old, but one can never have enough Lord of the Rings scenes made out of things Lord of the Rings scenes aren’t normally made of, amirite? Somebody make a Mordor diorama out of Barbies.
A Rose of Jericho three hours after being watered having nearly returned to is previous alive state
The Rose of Jericho(Anastatica hierochuntica) is a species of resurrection plant. These plants are characterized by their ability to use Poikilohydric mechanisms which enable them to survive extreme dehydration for years at a time.
“Weird Al” Yankovic will now be able to speak from authority when he writes his surely hilarious parody song about civil litigation. Yankovic just received an undisclosed sum from Sony, a settlement that comes almost two years after the singer sued his label over $5 million in unpaid royalties. Yankovic and his team claimed that Sony had failed to pay out publishing royalties for Running With Scissors and Poodle Hat. More importantly, Yankovic sought payment from digital music services like iTunes and streaming video sites like YouTube. Yankovic said that he never saw a dime from viral tracks like “White & Nerdy,” the video for which has been viewed 81 million times on Yankovic’s official YouTube channel. He will now see an undisclosed amount of dimes.
a friend of mine who's moved to hamburg wants to know what the fuck is up with all these chocolates shaped likes hammers and wrenches and screws and whatnot at the christmas markets
In January 2007, Italian artist and fashion designer Donatella Versace used Gänswein as the artistic inspiration for her Fall 2007 "Clergyman Collection", therein boosting popular recognition of Gänswein's nickname as being Bel Giorgio (English: Gorgeous George [5][).[7] In January 2013, Gänswein, without his consent or that of the Holy See, was on the cover of the Italian version of Vanity Fair magazine.[8]
Classmate, 2 hours ago | Having been in the class, section, exam room, and was even evacuated to the library with Eldo, I can say this is a shocking and unfortunate surprise. He always came to lecture, sat in the front of the room, and provided insightful and constrictive discussion regularly. He clearly did the homework and cared about the class, and I’m certain if he would’ve gone into the final without having studied at all, he would’ve gotten at least a B. It’s a shame that this option crossed his mind as a risk worth taking. Should this have been well premeditated, it disgusts me that the thought of getting a low grade in this class was enough motivation for him to do what he did. It was a fairly easy class, but the exam was worth a very significant portion of the class grade, and we still haven’t received a single (concrete) assignment grade to date.
Eldo Kim, a Harvard sophomore, has been charged in relation to Monday’s unfounded bomb threat on Harvard’s campus.
UPDATED: December 17, 2013, at 9:58 p.m.
Harvard College sophomore and Quincy House resident Eldo Kim, 20, has been charged in connection with Monday’s unfounded bomb threat against four buildings on Harvard’s campus, according to the affidavit.
Kim will appear in U.S. District Court in Boston on Wednesday for an initial hearing before U.S. Magistrate Judge Judith G. Dein. Assistant U.S. Attorney John A. Capin is handling the case for the government. The public defender's office is currently representing Kim, according to Department of Justice spokesperson Christina DiIorio-Sterling.
According to a press release by the Boston U.S. District Attorney’s office, Kim could face a maximum five years in prison, three years of supervised release, and a $250,000 fine if charged under the bomb hoax statute.
According to the affidavit, Kim told authorities he was “motivated by a desire to avoid a final exam scheduled to be held on [Monday].” Kim was present for that exam, which was held in Emerson Hall at 9 a.m., when the fire alarm went off, the affidavit says.
“According to KIM, upon hearing the alarm, he knew that his plan had worked,” the affidavit reads.
Earlier that morning, at approximately 8:30 a.m, Kim sent emails to two Harvard officials, an affiliate of Harvard University Police Department, and the President of The Crimson, saying that bombs had been placed two of four buildings, including the Science Center, Sever Hall, Emerson Hall, and Thayer Hall. In those emails, Kim wrote, “be quick for they will go off soon,” according to the affidavit.
The emails were sent using Guerrilla Mail, a free online application that generates temporary anonymous email addresses. Additionally, Kim used a free application called TOR, which generates a random anonymous IP address for temporary use that is difficult for law enforcement to trace.
According to the affidavit, authorities were able to determine that Kim had accessed TOR on the Harvard network before sending the email.
The threats prompted the evacuation of all four buildings shortly after 9 a.m..
Slate presents an amazing, interactive digital version of Olaus Magnus’ 1539 Carta Marina, a chart that portrays the sea as teeming with monsters…
When the chart was made, in the early years of the Age of Exploration, there was a lingering belief in the existence of griffins, unicorns, dragons, the phoenix, the monstrous races, and a host of other unnatural creatures. Modern science was in its infancy. Although adherents to the direct observation of nature would soon challenge hearsay and tradition and begin to classify animal life, at the time the medieval imagination was still free to shape its own forms of the natural world. The chart’s giant lobster gripping a swimmer in its claws, a monster being mistaken for an island, and a mast-high serpent devouring sailors would have represented actual fears of the unknown deep.
Those and Olaus’ other fanciful sea beasts are not mere decorations to fill empty spaces. Nor are they only visual metaphors for dangers lurking in the sea. Intended as representations of actual marine life, they are identified in the map’s key.
Click through to Slate to explore the stories of each creature, and read more on the chart’s origins…
We’re transcribing our historical restaurant menus, dish by dish, so that they can be searched by what people were eating back in the day. It’s a big job so we need your help!
"The emails were sent using Guerrilla Mail, a free online application that generates temporary anonymous email addresses. Additionally, Kim used a free application called TOR, which generates a random anonymous IP address for temporary use that is difficult for law enforcement to trace.
"According to the affidavit, authorities were able to determine that Kim had accessed TOR on the Harvard network before sending the email."
According to the affidavit, Kim told authorities he was “motivated by a desire to avoid a final exam scheduled to be held on [Monday].” Kim was present for that exam, which was held in Emerson Hall at 9 a.m., when the fire alarm went off, the affidavit says.
“According to KIM, upon hearing the alarm, he knew that his plan had worked,” the affidavit reads.
With a heavy heart we report to you that Harold Camping, failed Oakland-based doomsday soothsayer, has died. The Family Radio minister's prediction of a catastrophic May 21, 2011 rapture never happened — famously so, if you recall — which he then rescheduled to October 21 later that year. As many of you may be aware, that second prediction also never occurred. Alas. [ more › ]
One expert commentator quoted by the BBC suggests it is "a particular dialect of bureaucratese", but another possible analysis would be that the members of the DPRK's ghastly nuclear-armed luxury-guzzling prison-camp-addicted psycho ruling clique are stark staring raving mad (and even require announcers on the state-controlled TV news to sound insane). Naturally, there will be no comment here on the merits of these rival hypotheses. This is Language Log, not Murderous Monarchy Log.
Undergraduate, Department of Psychology, Harvard University:
Eldo Kim is a freshman intending to concentrate in Psychology and pursue a secondary in Japanese. He is currently a research assistant for Professor Gary King in analyzing partisan taunting. On campus, Eldo writes for the Harvard International Review and dances as a member of the Harvard Breakers. In his free time, he enjoys playing pool, trying new restaurants, watching terrible cult films, and playing with his Mini Schnauzer puppy.
An "Irishish" pub in Portland, The Snug, has released a new vegetarian menu, and it's a bit R-rated, from the "fucking deviled egg" to the "disfuckingclaimer" that customers should "assume everything has nuts and gluten in it...especially the nuts." There's also an "egregiously large bowl" of chili with "a wee dollop of sour cream," a literal sleeve of Ritz crackers, and more. [-EMAINE-] 
OnlyMrGodKnowsWhy
With a heavy heart we report to you that Harold Camping, failed Oakland-based doomsday soothsayer, has died. The Family Radio minister's prediction of a catastrophic May 21, 2011 rapture never happened — famously so, if you recall — which he then rescheduled to October 21 later that year. As many of you may be aware, that second prediction also never occurred. Alas. [ more › ]
