Tsujita

are fried chicken with chilies, top, dandan mian noodles, left, and Chongqing noodles, right. (Scott Varley / For The Times) Tsujita (79) If the popularity of the L.A. ramen shop has cooled somewhat in the last couple of years, you wouldn’t know it

from the way traffic on Sawtelle slows to a crawl around Tsujita L.A. and its annex location across the street. The object of desire is the shop’s specialty, tsukemen — thick, long, sinuous noodles that you wrest from your bowl with chopsticks and then

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from the Tsujita empire in LA. I mention Tsujita because Toshimasa Sano—the young chef at the center of Ramen & Tsukemen TAO—is said to have come from the original Tsujita in Tokyo. He worked there 10 years before moving here to start this venture. And

if you compare TAO’s menu to Tsujita’s, you’d have to conclude this restaurant is a carbon copy of it down to the cartoon step-by-step instructions on how to eat the tsukemen. This is not a bad thing. Tsujita was slated to open its first Orange County

Angeles is probably Tsujita, a branch of a well-regarded Tokyo noodle shop that has clotted traffic on Sawtelle Boulevard since it opened half a dozen years ago. On most days, the lines are just as long outside the Tsujita Annex across the street, a noodle

shop dedicated to an even richer style of ramen — the first time I visited I made the mistake of ordering my ramen kotteri, extra-fatty, and the bowl came topped with a glistening Alp of lard. And now there is the Tsujita in Glendale’s Americana at

Since the day it opened, Tsujita has attracted mobs to Sawtelle’s Little Osaka neighborhood; on sunny weekends, the wait for a table can last an hour or more. Tsujita, a spinoff of a well-respected Tokyo ramen restaurant, is small and accepts no

reservations. It also happens to serve the best ramen in a ramen-crazed part of town, and only at lunch. Across the street, the newer Tsujita Annex serves an ultra-rich, somewhat different kind of ramen for lunch and dinner, soaked in a gravy-thick pork broth

Just beyond Sawtelle Boulevard’s ramen row, where the nearly infinite variations on broth include the pork-intensive tonkotsu at Tsujita; Killer Noodle’s chile-spliced tantanmen; and the mushroom-based vegan “hippie” broth at Tatsu, you will bump

chile-inflected miso sauce. Mogu Mogu, like many local ramen restaurants including Tsujita, Daikokuya and Ramen Hood, uses wheat-flour noodles made by Sun Noodle, a supplier with manufacturing facilities in California, New Jersey and Hawaii. Mogu Mogu’s

local tantanmen restaurant remotely like Killer Noodle, the new tantanmen parlor from the people behind Tsujita, whose tsukemen and ramen are generally considered the best Los Angeles has ever seen. Killer Noodle occupies a prime spot on Sawtelle

Boulevard’s ramen row, across the street from a crowded udon kitchen and just up the block from the lines clogging the sidewalks around both Tsujita and Tsujita Annex. It is large, perhaps the size of both of the other ramen shops put together, painted crimson

the street in Hilton Plaza; it was quiet, like too many of the SGV’s restaurant-filled shopping centers. We landed at Killer Noodle, which opened its second location in December. Like the Sawtelle original (from the creators behind Tsujita), it

& Tsukemen TAO Chef/owner Toshimasa Sano worked at the legendary Tsujita Ramen in Tokyo for 10 years before coming to Southern California to continue his passion. Now in Buena Park with a ramen shop of his own, he’s focused primarily on miso ramen (and also

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next to the Tsujita Artisan Noodle, it takes the former spot of Rainforest Cafe. 3333 Bristol St, Costa Mesa, CA 92626 Noodlology, a braised beef noodle specialist which has two locations in Rowland Heights, has opened a location in Irvine across from

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