Yoshiharu Ramen

With 15 total restaurants – including six current locations in Orange County – Buena Park-based Yoshiharu Ramen combines Hokkaido-style Japanese ramen with a small collection of izakaya-style appetizers, sushi (primarily Americanized ‘special rolls’), and bowls with either poke or cooked meats with rice.

The star attraction here is delicious tonkotsu spicy black ramen, which combines pork bone broth with miso paste, then adds roasted black garlic oil and a red chili paste to create a soup that looks and tastes fantastic: unlike Orochon Ramen’s lava-like spicy ramen disasters, this is a hot soup with actual depth of flavor, chewy noodles, and great proteins. If you don’t like spice, salt, plain miso, and soy sauce base tonkotsu soups are available, as is a non-spicy black version with garlic paste. We’d call this place worth visiting for the spicy soups alone, but some of the izakaya-style appetizer items we ordered were underwhelming.

Yoshiharu Ramen remains on our “return again” list, and highly recommended for fans of tonkotsu-style ramen soups. Though the company is headquarted in Buena Park, its first and flagship location is in Orange.