Tag Archives: boulder

Update on ramen at Bento Zanmai in Boulder

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Bento Zanmai on the Hill in Boulder serves up tasty real ramen.

We returned to Bento Zanmai today and got some good news: the shop, which operates out of a tiny food court on The Hill in Boulder, just across the University of Colorado campus at 13th and College, has extended its hours.

The joint used to close up at 6 on weekdays and 3 on Saturdays. It unfortunately still closes at 3 on Saturdays (we got there just in time after seeing an early — and cheap — showing of Clint Eastwood’s “Gran Torino” movie, a post to come). But it now stays open until 8 pm on weekdays.

Joe Simonet, the affable young hapa who’s a corporate officer of the Sushi Zanmai restaurant corporation that owns Bento Zanmai as well as Amu, the izakaya next door to Sushi Zanmai that’s currently our favorite Japanese restaurant in the region, chatted with us about Bento Z.
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Bento Zanmai in Boulder hits the ramen spot

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Bento Zanmai in Boulder serves wonderful, rich ramen.

OK, I can stop whining. I’ve been on a ramen hunt for a couple of months. But I’ve finally sated my jones, with a trip top Bento Zanmai on the Hill in Boulder.

Unlike Los Angeles, where a row of ramen shops take up most of a block along Little Tokyo, and San Francisco’s Japantown, which has a several stellar restaurants that specialize in ramen, Denver is a ramen-lover’s desert island. We’re stranded in a place with no ramen in sight, and we’re left holding an empty bowl and a pair of chopsticks.

I overstate our condition. We used to go to Oshima Ramen, but it’s not as good as it was when it opened a decade ago. Plus, their ramen is pricey.

We’ve heard about a couple of Japanese restaurants north of Denver that apparently serve ramen, but we just don’t feel like driving that far. We’ll make the trip someday.

But when we were dining at one of our favorite restaurants, Amu, in Boulder (we live close to Boulder, so it’s not so far), we were talking with the owner, Nao-san, and we groused that he should serve ramen. He said, quite nonchalantly, that he was already serving ramen. Conversation at the izakaya‘s bar, where he was making up people’s tapas-like orders, came to a silent halt. The 10 people at the bar asked, in unison, “You make ramen? Why didn’t you say so?”

He explained that the ramen was available at his new restaurant, Bento Zanmai, at 13th and College in Boulder’s University Hill neighborhood. He warned that the ramen was only available from 3 to 6 pm — weird hours — but I was ready. I wanted ramen.
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The Sierra Club’s privileged caste: Is the green movement white?

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Sierra Club decalThe folk-rock group I play with, Mallworthy, was asked to perform at a holiday party and awards ceremony for the Sierra Club in Boulder last night. The event was held in the cafeteria of a Unitarian church, and there was a constant clatter with a couple-hundred people standing in line for the array of potluck food and then sitting and eating the food, while they talked and laughed.

We could barely hear ourselves play our brilliantly rehearsed setlist, never mind anyone in the “audience” paying any attention. One woman who stood about four feet in front of me while she waited in the food line leaned over and said she could barely hear our instruments but not our voices at all.

So when a well-heeled middle-aged woman in all black began banging her wine glass with a fork — during one of our songs — so the crowd could quiet down and listen to her announcements and several pages of “Bushisms” that she’s collected, I had had enough. It was a reflection of how invisible and unnecessary we were to the festivities at hand. Almost half an hour later, while the merry members held their raffle giveaway, we decided we should just pack up and go home.

We couldn’t even consider this a rehearsal since we couldn’t hear each others’ parts. It was nice to just get out of there.

But I had a cloud nagging at me all night, long after I’d gone home and started watching TV to distract my brain.

Even before the presumptuous woman interrupted our playing, I had looked out over the room and noted a disturbing fact: Besides myself, there were two Asian faces (women, who appeared to be there with Caucasian partners) and one African American woman. I wasn’t sure if anyone in the room was Hispanic. But it was clear that overwhelmingly, the room was filled with eager, erstwhile, Earth-loving white people.
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