Ramen Nagi

There is no such thing as the perfect bowl of ramen. Even back in the 1980s, when there were only a handful of styles including soy, salt, pork bone, or vegetable broth-based soups, there was no consensus in Japan (or Hawaii, as a U.S. proxy) as to which version was ideal – and far less competition than today. Now there are literally thousands of different ramen variations spread across too many restaurants to count, some offering guests the ability to customize everything from the oiliness and saltiness of broths to the firmness and thickness of noodles. Locally, a couple of great options include Buena Park’s Ramen & Tsukemen Tao, and the multi-location chain Yoshiharu Ramen.

At Ramen Nagi, a 21-year-old Japanese chain that opened its first OC location at South Coast Plaza in late March 2025, we experienced a perfect bowl of ramen. This wasn’t a world-ending, never-to-be-beaten bowl, but like the best recipes at San Juan Capistrano’s short-lived but phenomenal Ramen Shack, such an ideally balanced combination of ingredients, flavors, textures, and temperature that we would be concerned about changing any of the elements again.

It was a spicy-style “Red King” ($16.50) with normal salt, light oil, normal garlic, chashu pork, green onions, firm thin noodles, and “5” in the spice box, combining Nagi sauce and extra chili powder. The noodles were so ideally chewy and angel hair-sized that we’ve reset our standards for what’s possible with thin ramen noodles. Similarly, the chashu was just thick and soft enough to bite through without either falling apart or resisting, and the broth was rich with flavor and spice but not oil. We could have eaten three more portions of noodles in this broth if we hadn’t ordered anything else.

But we also tried three other ramens. “Black King” ($16.50) is a squid ink, garlic, and pork-based ramen with no obvious spice even if ordered at “normal” level 1 rather than “none,” augmented by black sesame and sliced pork. We ordered thin-sliced chashu but received pork belly instead, a minor oversight. “Original King” ($15.50) is a traditional tonkotsu pork broth, typically served with garlic and green onions, but here shown with light salt, light oil, and an added egg. Each of these bowls was really good, and ordered with traditionally spaghetti-thickness noodles, here called “thick.” The thin ones made more of an impression, but the thick ones were more traditional.