restaurant review

Continuing his search for a great bowl of ramen, Johnson Kong steps into Sansotei Ramen on Dundas.

For me, one of the delights on a cold winter day in Japan would be to

step out of the cold and dig into a steaming bowl of noodles at a

corner ramen shop. Nothing fancy about décor or style necessary – a

personal touch of history here and there perhaps. My favourite finds

were the holes-in-the-wall places where you were pretty much sitting

in someone’s tatami living room; often there would be an old TV

perched in a corner wafting the bland voice of an NHK announcer

reading the local news.

While there isn’t a TV (or at least one that I could see, anyway) in

Sansotei, as one of the newest ramen shops on the Toronto scene, it

stands out for its little-ramen-shop feel that I’ve been looking for

here since returning from Japan. Located on Dundas between Bay and

University, the sign on the store is so small that I walked past it

twice and had to look at what the window-counter singles were eating

to enter. Whereupon, I had to wait in line for one of the 34 seats –

though theoretically more people could probably fit on the benches.

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