Oshima Ramen

Oshima Ramen
7800 E. Hampden Ave.
Denver, CO 80231
720-482-0264

In Attendance, Ang, Jen, Rhonda, Lara, Caroline, Carol, and Marie

My first impression of Oshima Ramen…….WEIRD. Upon entering, you feel as if you have walked into someone’s dirty office. In fact, there is a sign that says something like, “don’t sit here, this is my office.” The piles of papers and junk are not exactly inviting. However, I have been to some dives before, and tried to look beyond THE OFFICE. I rounded the corner and saw my lovely Dinnergirls smiling back at me, and felt comforted.

It didn’t last long. We were sitting at a corner table as we usually do. The Dinnergirls are known to get a bit rowdy when we are having a good time! The table was dirty, I mean DIRTY. There was ground in dirt all over the plastic checkered tablecloth. I scanned around the rest of the restaurant quickly, and noticed that the whole place was somewhat grungy. Again, I kept telling myself that dives have some of the best food its okay, its okay, forget it! I kept looking down at the tablecloth and didn’t even want to touch it, eeeccck, and gross! I did enjoy the funny Asian cartoon posters on the wall!

Now to the food! The menu was interesting. I had never eaten ramen at a restaurant before, so I for one was excited. Ramen was usually something I ate at home curled up on the sofa and it was a wonderful college meal. There were all kinds of different broths, meats, and veggies to go choose from to go along with your ramen noodles. Honestly, I was scared to eat any kind of meat there, so I stuck with vegetarian ramen. Other girls were more adventurous and ordered meats and seafood in their ramen. Each ramen meal came with gyoza. I LOVE gyoza, but wasn’t looking forward to eating meat that came from a dirty kitchen. Oh the horror!

I almost forgot that before during and after ordering, we enjoyed mass quantities of hot sake! You can’t really screw up sake and it was fantastic! Our servers were very friendly and even helped us with the menu and figuring out what we were doing. The service at Oshima Ramen was good.

The gyoza starters arrived at our table. They were a bit different looking than any gyoza I have tried before. All the dumplings were stuck together and had a strange fried crust all around them.

Oshima Ramen has a bunch of different sauces and spices at each table apparently to use on your gyoza or ramen. I won’t go into how dirty the dispensers were, and I stayed away from them. A few girls were brave and smelled them, but didn’t look like they enjoyed the aromas. I stuck with soy sauce. I tore off a gyoza with my chopsticks, dunked it in soy sauce, and popped the whole thing in my mouth. I hesitated to chew. However, I was delighted with the taste that filled my mouth! I thought the gyoza was great! The gyoza dumplings were very tender and filled with very flavorful meats and veggies. I was ready to give Oshima Ramen the benefit of the doubt! The other girls seemed happy with their gyoza, as I recall. I think a few other girls ordered different appetizers, but can’t remember what they were in my sake haze.

Finally, our ramen appeared at the table. The bowls of hot and steamy ramen were enormous! My bowl was as big as my head. We all dug into our ramen and started commenting.

First off, mine was bland. Maybe I was used to the kind that came in a package, cost a $1, and filled with MSG to add flavor. The vegetable broth in this fresh ramen had no flavor at all. I dumped in at least a cup or two of soy sauce hoping to bring out some flavor, but I ended up with a bowl of bland soy sauce soup. I noticed a few other girls desperately trying to add flavor to their ramen too. The noodles in my ramen were very good compared to the broth. The noodles were fresh and tender. I was slow with my chopsticks, but finally learned you just had to shove in a mouthful of noodles and cut them off with your teeth. It was fun to slurp and twirl the noodles. My ramen also had some veggies added in and they were cooked perfectly, but had the same bland flavor as the ramen broth. In one word, the ramen was just boring.

Unfortunately, I don’t recall if the other girls liked their ramen or not, so I will leave it to them to add some comments!

I also want to say that if you visit Oshima Ramen, beware of the bathroom and the toilet paper weirdness. I imagine they think that they might run out, or they are too lazy to check and see if the bathroom is ever out of toilet paper so they stockpile it! There are literally 5 to 10 rolls of toilet paper shoved behind the toilet in between the toilet handrail. It also looks as if the toilet paper had once been wet and in the toilet. It was nasty in there and I couldn’t get out fast enough. I will leave the bathroom critique at that.

I am sorry to say, but out of all the Dinnergirls picks this one was mine and it was my least favorite. I don’t think I will have any reason to go back to Oshima Ramen and the funny office space in the corner. I might be persuaded to order some to-go gyoza, but that’s about it! I was very disappointed, especially after reading so many great reviews. I will stick with my 10 for $10 ramen at the grocery store, thank you!