HiroNori | Craft Ramen Santa Clara California [Review]

HiroNori is a California-founded ramen restaurant brand offering ramen bowl with housemade ingredients. Unlike other ramen restaurants, HiroNori produces their own noodles, stock, and sauces completely in-house with their original recipe. Their noodles are freshly cut daily. Their Irvine CA location was awarded a MICHELIN Guide Bib Gourmand award.

Their menu features just 4 ramen options: Tonkotsu; Shoyu; Vegan; and Spicy Gold Dipping Noodle. They offer combos with a mini green salad or mini rice bowl. Some side choices include: Edamame; Green Salad; Cucumber Crab Salad; Crispy Chicken; Crispy Rice with Spicy Tuna; and Pork Buns.

We visited their Santa Clara CA location and tried the following:

Tonkotsu Ramen

Their Tonkotsu Ramen is prepared with a 24-hour simmered pork bone broth accompanied by artisan crafted noodles. The dish is topped with bean sprouts, green onion, spinach, a half egg, seaweed, wood ear mushrooms, and pork chashu grilled to perfection.

Shoyu Ramen

The Shoyu ramen has a more clear broth consisting of chicken, pork bone, and soy sauce. The distinctive flavor of this dish comes from shoyu, or Japanese soy sauce. The bowl comes with spinach, bamboo, green onions, kaiware sprouts, a half egg, and exquisitely-prepared pork chashu.

To prepare the perfect shoyu ramen, they use soy sauce barreled for two years. These barrels have been used for more than 300 years at one of the oldest soy sauce factories in Japan. They are the only company in the United States using this special soy sauce.

Vegan Ramen

The HiroNori vegan ramen brings together sesame miso broth and artisan crafted noodles with broccolini, tofu, corn, bean sprouts, baby kale, and chili oil. Their recipe uses 5 kinds of miso imported from Japan.

I thought their ramen bowls were very good and well balanced with reasonable proportions of protein, vegetables, noodles and broth. They are all pretty loaded and prices seemed reasonable. The creamy, tonkotsu broth was my favourite but the Shoyu and Vegan were also delicious.

Crispy Chicken

with garlic, soy marinated fried chicken thigh

It’s a busy spot but they do accept some reservations through Yelp. Staff was friendly and the space was comfortable and inviting.

HiroNori Craft Ramen Santa Clara is located at 4300 Great America Pkwy #180, Santa Clara, CA. A great place to grab a bite to eat after visiting California’s Great America.

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