Mr. Coleman Can’t Compete With @momofuku Ramen

Mr. Coleman Can’t Compete With @momofuku Ramen

We recently discovered Mind of a Chef on Netflix. The show is great, but there’s one big downside of watching it — it leaves you wanting to eat food you may not have easy access too. We don’t all have a noodle shop down the street to satiate the cravings the show creates. And packaged ramen can only do so much, a lesson we learned on the road.

Luckily, we found our way back to New York City last week and had a chance to track down the perfect bowl of ramen at David Chang’s Momofuku Noodle Bar. We trained into Manhattan from Brooklyn and found … a closed restaurant, undergoing renovations.

But … it just didn’t seem right. We looked at the Google Map again.

“This doesn’t seem like it,” Lisa said, reading my mind.

We brought up the Momofuku website. We were not standing in front of David Chang’s Noodle Bar. We were a few blocks off, in front of an imposter.

“What if it was open?” Lisa asked as we walked away, heading north up First Avenue. “We would have never known!”

“We would have figured it out,” I promised her. “It didn’t look right. Or we would have eaten lunch twice.”

After a few blocks, we found the Real McCoy. We got the last two open seats. The food wasn’t like anything we made on the Coleman stove while camping.

Lisa got the Vegetable Ramen -- with cheese!
Lisa got the Vegetable Ramen — with cheese!
I got the Momofuku Ramen with poached egg and pork belly.
I got the Momofuku Ramen with poached egg and pork belly.

Many minutes later …

Not a complete victory. It's a big bowl of food.
Not a complete victory. It’s a big bowl of food.

All you need to know: Momofuku Noodle Bar opens at noon and is located on First Avenue between 10th and 11th (near Stuyvesant Town). It is not located on Stanton Street in the Lower East Side. And don’t miss the pork buns — they’re amazing.