Ramen in the culinary capital of the world should be not bad. The queue was mainly French, but the entire staff was Japanese.
Located on the outskirts of Paris’s Little Tokyo (around Rue Sainte Anne in the second arrondissement), Sanjo has a chicly stark interior, with fluorescent tubes above the bar, exposed brick and stone walls, and a profusion of huge round hanging lamps for a Pop effect. The lack of Japanese in the queue was already, if anything, a worrisome sign. We were lucky enough to have a table at the bar counter, and could watch everything being made.
A Japanese fashion designer, Kaito Hori, after spending time at Paris Fashion Week, wasn’t happy with the ramen scene. He wanted a simple tonkotsu ramen, and Sanjo was born. Chefs Ryoun Komatsu and Masa Hayatsu have credentials in the ramen world, from both Paris and Kyoto. Soup de porc would be the staple at Sanjo.
Sure, you can’t run a ramen shop outside of Japan without sides like gyoza or rice bowls but the ramen would reign at Sanjo. The gyozas were a healthy version of Japanese dumplings, obviously homemade and filled with pork and greens but not fried. They were more like Chinese dumplings with Szechuan peppercorn sauce, quite delicious.
The karaage chicken wasn’t something I expected. It was not heavily battered like the ones in a Japanese izakaya. Because it was chicken breast, I could close my eyes and think that it was my school tuckshop pork chop that was marinated with nothing by soy sauce.
The ramen, the veritable stars of the house, can be prepared shirunashi-style (spicy ground pork, a soft-boiled egg and a sesame sauce, without broth) or Sanjo-style (braised pork loin, a soft-boiled egg, nori, black wood ear fungus and spicy bamboo shoots, all in a rich pork and chicken broth). We both had Sanjo-style which is the classic tonkotsu ramen with homemade noodles as our main course.
Ramen noodles are low in fibre, vitamins, minerals, and protein. They are very filling, but ramen noodles offer almost no nutrition and many calories. We just came from an all-protein meal with no carbs, so this bowl of warm noodles hit the spot.
The soup itself is indescribable, I think that’s what they call umami. It was richly flavoured and rather thick and cloudy. It was something familiar yet I could not place it to any ramen store in Japan. The stock was simply pork bones cooked for eight hours with no other additions. The whole dish is just beautifully balanced, and quite filling for a decent price.
The food scene in the 2nd Arr. is very Asian – Chinese, Japanese, Thai…, the area is full of eateries with questionable Asian cuisine. Historically, most shops served a mismatched menu of whatever was trending at the time. Sanjo was a breath of fresh air when it opened in 2018 with a clear intention to lead the category of ramen.
Decoration and presentation of the dishes is somehow minimalist, just what is needed and nothing else, but that doesn’t reduce a bit the charming atmosphere. There’s no reservations and if you arrive like us at 8 pm, there’s a lot of waiting. A good eat if you are craving for authentic Japanese ramen noodles.
Sanjo
29 Rue d’Argenteuil, 75001 Paris, France
Tel : +33 1 40 28 08 78 (no reservations)
Visited Oct 2024
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