First Impressions: Umami Ramen & Dumpling Bar

The idea of renovating an 1880s house on Willy Street in order to serve noodles was interesting even before anyone set foot in Umami Ramen & Dumpling Bar (923 Williamson St., 608-819-6319), which just opened to the public on March 4. The A.V. Club swooped in like a starving and greedy bird to get a first impression of the much-buzzed-about new house of soup and dumplings.

The space and service: This being a former house, there are various rooms with tables, but the best place to sit seems to be up at the bar, crafted from reclaimed wood that retains the rough-hewn perimeter of a large tree on the outward-facing edge but is highly polished on top. A bartender attends to needs of Sapporo on tap, specialty drinks like the “Tokyo Snow Pear”—Ozeki Junmai sake and St. Germaine elderflower dissolved into pear juice—and plates of mostly Japanese fare from the kitchen, served at a leisurely pace.

The A.V. Club’s food: The starter plate of two pork buns wedges fat slices of pickled cucumber and a pile of delicately braised pig against pillowy, folded, Moonboot-textured mantou bun lightly daubed with plummy hoison sauce. It’s a smash of sour crispness and salty meat enveloped in mellow bread.

Pork and chive dumplings are seared hard to create a crunchy crust and lock in the flavors of Taiwanese cabbage, chives, and ginger. The A.V. Club liked them enough to order a second plate; these stuffed with carrot, scallions, ginger, and minced chicken. Dumplings here are not unlike pot stickers—pleasingly soft at their bulbous love handle-like protuberances, with spicy, sweet, and sour dunking sauces that make the mild dumplings sing louder.

Umami’s main attraction, ramen, has an unfortunate connotation in America, where many an impoverished student loaded up on cubes of dried noodles with packs of flavored chemicals to make ends meet after all the money went to beer. But a sturdier sort of ramen, the soup that sustained Japan during the hard times after World War II, is here, and boy, is it comforting, especially on a cold day. Fat noodles float in a subtle miso-infused broth with pork brine-braised egg, nori, green onions, bean sprouts, bamboo shoots, and several strips of tender chicken. That’s miso ramen.

The verdict: It’s a quirky experience—just finding the door is an unusual exercise—but on this brief sampling, the food was quite good, and the vibe was fun. The owners are two cheerful guys who grew up in Brooklyn and Queens with Madison connections. They conspired to start up a noodle house here over games of basketball, even taking a trip to Japan as research in order to nail the ingredients and preparation. The result is a relaxed, mid-to-highly priced but fully worthwhile noodle hut in just the right part of town—accessible to both downtown and the near East side—and a win for Madison.