This Ramen is Fire!

Happy New Year my fellow Ibarakians!
I am back and ready for 2025. The temperature has been dropping recently which is not great for this homegrown Florida guy. Just the other day with the strong wind chill it felt like -5 degrees Celsius. During these cold times, the only thing on my mind is getting something hot to eat. That usually means ramen. Ramen in winter is great (unless you are waiting outside in line for it). Spicy ramen is even better. One afternoon, the Ibaraki Eats Duo headed to a newly opened ramen restaurant that did spicy ramen. Not only do they do spicy ramen, but they light it on fire! Today's post is about a little ramen shop called Noodle Labo Tiger and Dragon.

Noodle Labo Tiger and Dragon

Tiger and Dragon is located in the Migimomi area of Tsuchiura City. It is a small ramen shop located near an elementary school and preschool down the street. It is a pretty new ramen shop as it opened during late autumn of last year. I had driven by the place a few times but what captured my attention was the picture of the sign by the door with a flaming ramen on it. I told my wife about it and she said we had to go. So in early January, we headed to this fire ramen place to warm up our bones from the bitter cold.
I should mention that I am cheating a bit with this post. Tiger and Dragon is not an Ibaraki original. I am not sure if the main restaurant is from either Saitama or Tochigi. But this is the only Ibaraki place and it was too interesting to post as a Side Note.
Anyway, my wife and I parked our car and headed in.

Inside

Tiger and Dragon is like all other ramen places. A ticket vending machine greets you at the door and there is table seating all around the restaurant. One thing I found interesting was that the kitchen is closed off by a glass window that goes all around the restaurant. You can still see the kitchen and the chef working hard, but it is still closed off from the customers. I am sure since this place does spicy ramen, it might be for the customer's safety since they are working with many spices.

The Menu

Sorry, my non-speaking Japanese readers, the menu is only in Japanese. I did not see an English menu anywhere.
The menu has spicy and electric-numbing ramen at the top right side with a miso soup base, next is a rich miso ramen and a spicy maze soba. The question marked ramen is the special ramen of the day.
At the bottom left is the hell ramen which uses a chili pepper called Carolina Reaper. That chili pepper is categorized as the hottest chili pepper in the world. If you order this ramen, you have four choices: level 1 is super spicy, level 2 you might die from this ramen, level 3 it is the spiciest thing in Ibaraki, and level infinity has a special rule, if you finish the ramen and drink all the soup in 15 minutes, the ramen is free. Of course, you might burn a hole in your stomach if you take this challenge.
Next to that is the fire ramen which has a miso soup base.
Finally, the menu has all the toppings next to the fire ramen. With all the ramen, you can choose the level of spiciness.
After looking over the menu, my wife and I grabbed our tickets from the ticket vending machine and waited for our ramen.

Gyoza

If you would like a side dish with your ramen, I do suggest ordering the special gyoza dish at Tiger Dragon. What is interesting about this dish is that it brings different kinds of gyoza as you can see from the picture. We ordered the small size gyoza dish because we weren't sure how big the ramen would be. The regular looking gyoza was OK but I am a fan of the round gyoza myself. When you bite into it, a blast of minced meat and flavor floods your mouth in seconds which is a nice feeling.
Now let's get to the ramen.

Fire Ramen

When my ramen came to our table, it wasn't on fire yet. It was placed in front of me and then the ramen chef squirted oil all around the inside of the ramen bowl. She then used a blow torch and that is when my ramen went up in flames. It was so cool. I was at Tiger and Dragon during winter so having a flaming ramen in front of me felt so nice.
The flames burned brightly at first but then began to die down after a minute. When the flames were completely out, I grabbed my chopsticks and started slurping. As I stated in the menu part of this post, you can chose what level of spiciness you would like. I didn't want to feel like my mouth was in pain while eating this ramen so I went with a low spicy level. If you want some spice in your ramen, I don't recommend this level. It has a small kick to it when you start slurping your noodles but that spicy kick is gone within seconds. Even though the spicy element to this ramen was missing, the soup was very tasty and the noodles were a great texture for this soup and very chewy. I really enjoyed the noodles and even all the moyashi with its added red pepper on it. The same can't be said about the chashu. Sorry Tiger and Dragon, but you need to rethink your chashu for this ramen. When I bit into this chashu, a tsunami of spice and flavor hit the back of my throat with a vengeance. So much so that I started coughing after I bit into it. The chashu was hard and thick. It did have a good meaty taste to it like all chashu does, but that is about it. It was just a heavy block of pork that didn't help this ramen at all. I enjoyed the soup and noodles, but the chashu needs to go.

After I finished my ramen, my body felt warmed up and ready to take on the cruel winter cold. I mean it. When I stepped outside, I had to take off my coat because I felt so hot. This ramen trip was an entertaining and nice little lunch trip. I thought the fire aspect of this ramen was fun and the soup was delicious. Even though the chashu was not up to par, the rest of the ramen was quite good. Thank you for an interesting ramen experience Tiger and Dragon. I hope to come have the fire ramen again, but not in summer.

So if you are around the Migimomi area of Tsuchiura and are looking for a tasty way to warm yourself up, why not give Noodle Labo Tiger and Dragon a chance? Who knows, you might see us there, looking at our fire ramen in awe while it warms us up from the winter cold.
Enjoy!

For more information on Noodles Labo Tiger and Dragon's Ibaraki location, check out their Instagram page:
https://www.instagram.com/tigerdragon.tsuchiura/