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Restaurant Review

Slurping Solo, in Sweet Isolation, at Ichiran in Brooklyn

Ichiran

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Benjamin Norman for The New York Times
Ichiran
Japanese
$$
374 Johnson Avenue, Bushwick
718-381-0491

Ichiran, a Japanese ramen chain that touched down in Brooklyn last fall, makes one kind of soup, the opaque ivory pork broth called tonkotsu. Like a heart surgeon who operates only on the left ventricle, it has staked out a niche within a niche.

Within its microspecialty, though, Ichiran presents you with a boggling number of decisions. The first comes before the menu, and it will determine what kind of restaurant you eat in. When you walk in from Johnson Avenue, one of those Bushwick streets that runs along blank walls that hide disquieting postindustrial scars, you’re asked if you would rather sit in a booth or at a table.

This is an easy choice. The tables are arranged in a bright room with red paper lanterns, promotional posters and a television in the corner. It will do if you came with a group, but it is as special as the nicer restaurants in Penn Station.

The booths, on the other hand, aren’t like anything else in town. There are two long rows of them separated by a long alley where the servers work. The booths are separated from this backstage area by bamboo shades and one another by hinged partitions. When the partitions were shut and the shades were down, I was all by myself. I couldn’t decide if it felt more like a library carrel, a peep show or a confessional. (“My child, how long has it been since you last slurped a noodle?”)

According to the company, which has around 60 locations in Japan, these are “flavor concentration booths.” In the closed position, the partitions did seem to keep the sweet-smelling steam that rises off the soup from wandering away on currents of air. I could soak in the aroma even when my head wasn’t bent over the bowl.

The effect was minimal, though, and I wondered if the thing that was supposed to be doing the concentrating was me.

The signs tacked up all over the place were distracting, though. There is even one taped to the restroom wall explaining that Ichiran’s owner is determined never to run out of toilet paper. The wall is already covered with toilet paper rolls, but a few extra sheets are tucked behind the note, in case of emergency.

One of the many signs inside the booth read, “Flavor Concentration in progress — please be quiet and silence your phones.” In theory, you could eat a whole meal at Ichiran with no human contact. The menu is a checklist. A laminated card signals that you want a water refill. The paper wrapper on the chopsticks doubles as an order form for extra noodles if you finish the ones in the bowl. Leave one of them by the red call button, press it, and a server rolls up the shade to take away your order.

All of this may happen wordlessly in Japan. In New York, we talk. Almost every time the shade went up, a server bent over to peer through the opening, which is at the height of a belt buckle, to chat about my order.

One night, just after I sat down, the screen went up, and a hand stretched toward me. Without thinking, I held out mine, and we shook. Anxiety flushed through me. Had I broken ramen protocol? Was this like reaching over the front seat of a car to give an Uber driver a neck rub?

I recovered from my shame and started filling out the menu with check marks and circles. How strong did I want the broth? How rich with melted pork fat — a few isolated slicks coasting on top of the soup, or a layer thick as frosting on a cupcake? Would I like chopped scallions or not? How about cha-shu, thin slices of marinated pork? Extra cha-shu on the side? No chopped garlic, a pile of garlic, or something in between?

Should my noodles be soft on arrival, or firm because they’d get to keep cooking in the hot soup? Finally, did I want any of Ichiran’s proprietary spice mixture dropped on top, and if so, how much? Would a few pinpricks of fire do, or should I make the broth so incendiary that I would have to reach for the tissues mounted on the wall behind me?

All these decisions would be pointless, of course, if the ramen were not very good. It is. Whether you will prefer it to the majestically potent tonkotsu at Mu Ramen or the memorably savory one at Ippudo, I can’t say. But it is rounded and substantial, moving across the mouth with the glide and density of extralight coffee. The flavor is very porky without any of the unnerving butcher-shop note that creeps into some tonkotsus. I was never served a bowl that was less than painfully hot, which is the ideal.

One edge Ichiran holds over its competitors is that you can give what you consider the correct answer to all of those questions. For the record, my preferences after a few rounds of experimentation are: broth of medium richness and strength; yes to scallions and the standard, free portion of cha-shu (it is less flavorful than at some other places, the meat less generous with jiggly streaks of fat); a smallish dab of garlic; and firm but not “extra firm” noodles, which are straight and skinny, like spaghetti.

The spice blend is called hiden no tare, which translates as “secret sauce.” Supposedly only four people know the recipe. This coarse, rust-colored paste adds more than heat; after it sits in the soup for a while, the broth takes on a toasted flavor that sometimes reminded me of roasted peanuts. The amount I asked for varied based on how badly my head required banging that day. I stopped short of a full skull-shattering dose, but it’s reassuring to know I can get it when the need arises.

These basic options don’t change the cost of the soup, $18.90. Tips are not accepted, which brings the price into line with, say, Ivan Ramen or Ippudo. Ichiran’s ramen can become one of the most expensive in town, though, if you add toppings like a cooked egg, squares of dried nori or wood ear mushrooms, which come with extra charges.

Those who, like me, enjoy semiliquid yolks in their ramen will not want the egg, which is solid all the way through. The only garnish I was happy to spend more money for was the little pitcher of vinegar for $1.90. It has a soft, somewhat oxidized bite, like that of aged sherry vinegar, and it brings definition to the blunt contours of the pork broth.

There is one dessert, an almond-tofu pudding glazed with matcha. The only other dish, strips of simmered pork belly, can be eaten with a bowl of white rice. The pork was good enough to pad my stomach, but when hunger is my concern, I’ll go for a supplementary coil of noodles. Crouched in my booth, I’ll practice my slurp, and when hot droplets of soup fly everywhere, nobody will get spattered but me.

EMAIL petewells@nytimes.com. And follow Pete Wells on Twitter: @pete_wells.

A version of this article appears in print on  , Section D, Page 7 of the New York edition with the headline: Slurping Solo, in Sweet Isolation. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe

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