Orochon Ramen
Famous from Man vs. Food’s TV eating challenge, this LA ramen shop will melt either you or your brain
The trouble with Orochon Ramen’s most famous entree, the Special 2 Challenge ramen soup, isn’t that it’s the spiciest bowl of soup we’ve ever eaten, rating a nine out of nine on the restaurant’s scale (and an eight out of ten on our personal scale) or that it’s the biggest bowl we’ve ever consumed, weighing two pounds including noodles, pork, vegetables, and broth. It’s that there’s a time limit to eat it, every drop must be drained from the bowl, and at some point, a reasonably sized human stomach can’t hold two pounds of liquid lava.
There are other items on the Orochon menu – 15 of them besides their three ramen styles (miso, shoyu, and shio), including gyoza, edamame, fried chicken, and fried rice. But the Special 2 Challenge Ramen is the one that got Orochon on Man vs. Food, and the one that now wins successful eaters a commemorative porcelain soup spoon and their digital photo on the restaurant’s wall.
Should you go to Orochon, which is on the top floor of a shopping center in LA’s Little Tokyo, you should probably order anything but that soup, because there is no positive reaction a human body can have to ingesting it. If you succeed, as we did, it will certainly be a Pyrrhic victory in that you will be forced to expel the spicy liquid in some or multiple ways. And consuming it won’t be fun, either, even if you have such a spice tolerance that you can taste through the heat to the ingredients, which again, we did. This wasn’t a soup with great depth of flavor: it was just a ton of spice, not so much authentically Japanese or delicious as something that needs to be endured.
We won our spoon and place on the wall, but we forever lost what little ambition we had to participate in such a thing again. By testing us, Orochon’s Special 2 Challenge laid bare a sad truth about eating challenges: Food should be fun and delicious, not something to push through in hopes of reward or external validation. We haven’t returned, and wouldn’t wish the same experience upon anyone else.
Stats
Price: $$
Service: Table
Open Since: 2002
Addresses
123 Astronaut Ellison
S. Onizuka St. Suite 303
Los Angeles, CA 90012
213.617.1766
Instagram: @orochonramenla
