Jinya Ramen Bar – Kerrisdale

We tried out the Jinya Ramen’s Kerrisdale location after a nice summer hike near UBC.  They are located on W41 Ave near West Boulevard.

It wasn’t too busy as it was way past lunch time.  It is quite a modern looking restaurant. This is their bar area and open kitchen.

Normal tables

It was during happy hour so the server introduced us to the specials:

Daily drink specials:

Their regular menu is colorful with many pictures of their food.  However, we noticed the prices for ramen at this location are a lot more than the downtown location when we last visited. It is quite a jump, about $15 a ramen!  I’m pretty sure it was about $11 not too long ago? 

We started with their crispy chicken from the happy hour menu:

There were 5 plump pieces of boneless dark meat chicken. It comes with a tiny salad as garnish and some dipping sauce.  The chicken was crispy like it should be and the meat itself was juicy.

We ordered a sukiyaki beef rice bowl:

It had lots of tender beef and had a good portion of rice.  While in the middle of eating this, the server suddenly came by and apologized and dropped off these dishes:

It was a soft cooked cold egg, some ginger and chili powder.  I think she was trying to tell me that they forgot to serve these items with the rice.  I was not aware these were included.  Perhaps the egg is to mix into the hot rice?   If so, my rice was already cold and half gone by the time this arrived.  I just slurped down the egg by itself.

They have lots of ramen choices with unique names.  We ordered the Sprouting Up Ramen.

It is served with thick ramen and has these items for toppings:  pork and chicken broth, pork chashu, kikurage, spicy bean sprouts, green onion, half seasoned egg*, crispy brussels sprouts, black pepper, ginger.

The soup was very rich with deep flavour without being too salty.  The ramen had good chewy texture too.

The ramen here is a bit pricey but was presented very well. However it was not good enough to justify such a high price.  We prefer the ramen shops that let you choose options like broth richness, spicy level, pork fat level etc.

SFDD gives 3 out of 5 Delights.

Gringo Bandito Hot Sauce - Hot Wings!

As promised, we are delighted to test out some Gringo Bandito hot sauce. First up, hot wings using some Gringo Bandito hot sauce.  Out of the three hot sauces we have available, we thought we should play it safe first by selecting the milder version.  Along for the ride is about half a pound of juicy wings.

We kept the preparation simple by not adding any other flavours except for just a pinch of salt when preparing the wings because we wanted to get a better idea of how the hot sauce tastes.  We first precooked the wings by themselves in the oven by cooking it for 30 minutes @ 375 F.

Afterwards, we doused about 5 tablespoons of Gringo hot sauce on a frying pan to heat it up.  This hot sauce appears thicker than some other similar sauces so it is easy to work with later on when we add the wings.  Looking closer at the sauce, we can also see some of the spices used to make the sauce. 

We then transferred the wings directly from the oven into the hot pan.  We mixed the sauce all over the wings for about 3 minutes.   We then transferred the wings back into the oven and cooked it for another 5 minutes @ 375 F to let the sauce sink into the wings a bit more.

The result:

The wings are now a deep dark orange flavour and completely dominated by Gringo hot sauce’s aroma.

The taste?  We were quite impressed that the sauce was able to flavour the chicken wings so well.  Note that we did not use any other ingredients to marinade.  The wings were not bland at all thanks to the hot sauce.  We think the reason is because the sauce is not just ‘hot’, but instead has some unique flavors built in which is probably some secret spice recipe.

How hot is the sauce?  On a scale of 10, we would say 6.5 to 7.

We are looking forward to trying this sauce more later on when we get a chance.

SFDD gives 4 out of 5 Delights.