Tam Popo - Measured Disappointment

As past entries have demonstrated, I take ramen seriously. My girlfriend is right: I do have an Asian fetish… only the playful Oriental minx I crave is soaking in a complex broth, with a dash of bamboo shoots, green onions, bean sprouts and thinly sliced seasoned pork – and for once that’s not an innuendo. If ramen were a person, ramen would have a restraining order against me. I would follow ramen at night from a discrete distance in my tinted Aerostar van. I would read ramen’s mail and hack ramen’s Friendster (look, the ramen I know doesn’t abandon the original social networking tool just because everyone else jumped ship). And if I hurt ramen, it’s only because I love ramen so much, right?

Against this background, you can appreciate the anticipation as I joined super friends and fellow ramen obsessors Sizzlenutz and Chlodnik at Tam Popo (5665 N Lincoln Ave). LTHForum had titillated us with the possibility of great ramen without a drive to the suburbs. I’ve been called an elitist several times, but it’s not a character defect in me that people enjoy flavorless derivative mush like Avatar (and yes, I saw Avatar in 3-D. Shitty character and plot development set to bad acting does not get better just because the moron spectacle-o-meter is set to 11).

What is my point? Despite the wisdom of the crowds, perhaps there is room for elite opinion. I can appreciate Yelp and LTHForum as platforms for democratic opinion exchange. But at GCL there is no deluge of contradicting pronouncements. Once our readers sift through the self loathing and tangential asides that saturate our entries, they’ll see we are purposeful on which restaurants we choose to praise and not praise. It takes more than social inadequacy combined with the annoyingly self-aware diction of a New Yorker subscriber to become a GCL contributor. It requires a spirit of gastro adventurism to enter establishments with less than stellar health ratings in the hopes of a new taste experience.

Tam Popo had so many things going for it – friendly staff with limited command of English, intimate location in a food district known for its East Asian population, high praise from food message boards. Still, other than interesting, almost dessert-like scallop sakura appetizer,
the tanmen and shoyu ramen left these gastronomes less than fulfilled. There was nothing particularly wrong with our ramen, but it lacked the full gusto character we had expected. There was a collective shrug, as when Chlodnik meets my b-friends and says, “they’re just so…nice” in a manner that makes it clear normalcy is a pejorative term in her schema.

Fortunately our solipsistic triangle remained as satisfying as ever. This past winter in Chicago felt just a little bit warmer due in no small part to their company (and also because it actually was warmer, scientifically speaking). Food critiquing is hard…friendship even harder…but making Sizzlenutz giggle while Chlodnik sighs, well that’s just the piano to my Mozart.

But yeah, now that I have a girlfriend I don't really need them that much anymore. Amirite?