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Located in a quiet Higashi-Nakano area (just 2 stations away from Shinjuku) Kashiwagi lies tucked away. 

Kashiwagi has been voted in the top 100 ramen restaurants on tabelog (Japan’s biggest food review site) for years as well as being featured in the 2018 Tokyo Bib Gourmand Michelin guide (restaurants under 5000 yen).

This is well under that, with their bowls costing around just 1000, yet the quality being very high. 

They specialize in a soy-sauce based soup and they don’t overcomplicate it. In fact, it is a very simple bowl of ramen. 

It has just 3 things – noodles, pork, and some green onions as a garnish. 

Despite this however, they have mastered the soy-sauce broth to a tee. You see, there is only so much one can do to transform a soup with a soy-sauce base. This paired with the fact that it is one of the most commonly made ramen in Japan also adds another hurdle to achieving success with it. 

I have seen quite a few shops that do different spins on it, sometimes making the bowl a bit too fancy to the point where it no longer gives me the feeling that I am eating ramen. 

Kashiwagi however didn’t, and I think their strength lies in their simplicity. 

The soy-sauce broth is dark, and that usually is a sign the broth is going to be strong. This was exactly the case here, and the umami from the soybeans let loose my hunger. 

The noodles are thin and generally the same kind with what you will see with soy-sauce ramen, but they were also very good. I do not think they are handmade, but even mass produced noodles in Japan you will find are extremely good quality.

Another thing I ordered too is a cheap staple in cheap, “use whatever you have laying around the house” kind of dish called TKG which stands for tamago kake gohan, or raw egg over rice. 

Sometimes you will see this served at ramen shops, and I was especially happy to see it here, because TKG is usually eaten with soy-sauce. 

So instead of just drinking all the soup, being able to pour some over my rice mellowed down the strength a bit while making the rather plain TKG more exciting.

I also ordered the TKG partly out of curiosity and partly because I felt like the soy-sauce broth was strong enough that I wanted something to pace myself with, and it was the right call.

It is one of those menu items that seems almost too simple to bother with until you actually try it, and then you understand immediately why it exists.

The egg mellows out the intensity of the broth in the same way that rice does, but with a creaminess that rice alone cannot provide.

It is a very Japanese way of eating — using simple, cheap ingredients to get more out of what is already on the table — and Kashiwagi does it in a way that feels completely natural rather than like an afterthought.

Being in such a close proximity to Shinjuku, and being this popular of a shop, I think that going to check it out is worth it! Especially so because it will be a lot less crowded than other major Tokyo wards!

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