Photo: Courtesy of Ippudo V
There are two likely reasons why Ippudo V, the sixth New York location of the Japanese ramen chain, hasn’t achieved the line-out-the-door status of its other outposts despite having opened this summer. First, the V stands for “vegan,” and the window and sidewalk signs proclaiming “vegan ramen” may be doing more harm than good regarding the people who rightly associate Ippudo’s noodle soup with the essence of pork. (A co-worker walks past the space several times a week and told me that he never even realized it was an Ippudo.) The other detrimental detail is that this restaurant is located in Dumbo, and not the cute waterfront part of Dumbo. This restaurant is in bridge-overpass Dumbo at a particularly windy intersection of construction and multilane traffic.
But Ippudo V is worth a stop, especially on the windiest night, no matter what one’s meat-eating credentials might be. Right away, it doesn’t seem quite like a “restaurant” owing to a full-fledged gift shop hawking Ippudo-branded gear — a rack of hoodies, stacks of tie-dye T-shirts and caps, insulated water bottles — immediately to the left of the entrance. But behind the streetwear is an open kitchen facing a brightly lit bar that, along with the random coffee-table books and plastic ivy wall, evokes a co-working space. The menu is presented via a QR code imprinted on a wood block.
The plants may be fake, but the vegan menu doesn’t lean on Impossible-style imitation protein, except for something called “soy meat,” which appears in one of the ramen dishes and which I also suspect could be the “plant-based pork” found in the gyoza. All four soups — soy, miso, “chicken,” “pork” — are largely garnished with vegetables cut and cooked to various effects, like a slice of grilled tomato and onion tempura in the soy broth. (Plant-based “tuna” shows up in some of the sushi rolls, but the one I had was skippable; you are coming here for the noodles.)
This happens to be the first vegan Ippudo out of its many locations in California, Europe, and all over the Pacific, and while there does seem to be some component overlap with the vegan options at a “regular” New York Ippudo — tofu chashu, fried enoki mushrooms — the dishes at Ippudo V feel totally different, starting with tonkotsu-inspired broth, as cloudy as the recipe made from pork bones and possibly more savory. My server suggested stirring in a scoop of natto — fermented soy — for a flavor boost, but the soup was salty and rich enough to support the thick, curly ramen noodles that were still plenty chewy as I ate them. Those noodles also fared better than the thinner wheat noodles in a clear, poultrylike broth, though I liked the heavy dose of leeks, cabbage, and garlic chips that perfumed the bowl.
Compared to a recent stop at the East Village Ippudo, which had a wait list at 4 p.m. on a Saturday, I can say that the bowl-for-bowl experience is currently better at Ippudo V, even if it’s not on the radar of ramen trackers yet. In Dumbo, two guys sitting next to me at the bar had stopped in on their way back to Queens after a Nets game after learning about it on social media. One of them, a vegetarian Japanophile, told me that he thinks of Ippudo as “the old gray lady of ramen,” where “vegetarians seem like an afterthought.” This, he said, felt different. That hunch was reinforced when my miso ramen arrived under a dome of glass. The server lifted the lid and woody smoke floated across the bar. My new friends were impressed with the show. “This,” one said, “was not on the TikTok.”
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