Things I regret - this.

Things I regret - this. Well, spending money on it. I went to the mothership of the ramen place, where they serve more than ramen. The chef does specialty things each month. This month one of those was smoked duck breast yakisoba. It sounded really good.

In the event, I will say that the portion sizes are more than generous, including the amount of duck. I will also say that there are definitely flavors (and sometimes textures, although not here) that I find very challenging in Japanese food. For whatever reason, this just wasn't good. It was funky, but I couldn't even figure out why.

The smoked duck breast was very good, so was the pickled ginger, so were the bits of cabbage. And I did something I never do; I asked for soy sauce. Which didn't help, as their soy sauce is home brewed and tastes very brewed, whatever that means. It didn't add much salt at all, and I should have known better, as there were bonito flakes and seaweed (kelp?) shreds in abundance, so lack of salt was clearly not the problem. The brew/yeast flavor of the soy sauce really didn't help blend any of this.

My best guess is that the sauce itself (the one that the noodles came in) was the issue. I know that one of the common but controversial ingredients in yakisoba sauce can be ketchup, and that might have helped because of the tomato acidity and the sweetness, but this did not have it. There was something sort of sweet about the sauce, but not exactly, and it just tasted odd.

Basically, the flavors did not blend at all, and they certainly didn't work with the smoked duck breast. Considering that I thought the okonomiyaki fries at the ramen branch were quite tasty, if a little heavy, something had to be really off kilter for this to have turned me off so much on the taste front.