Benkei Ramen on Broadway

I've officially given up on Benkei Ramen's Miso Ramen.  It's just too lean for me and doesn't have enough seasoning.  It's not bad, it's just not my thing.  I tried their new location - Broadway and Cambie and also found another bit of disturbing news.  The Peko Ramen (formerly known as Shiro Ramen) is now only available at the Robson location. 

Surprisingly, I found the Vegetable Shoyu Ramen to be much more flavourful and tasty compared to my miso ramen.  Sad that I actually enjoyed something that had the word vegetable in it. 

As sugggested by Yanagida-san (CEO of Benkei Ramen Group) and Mr. Chan (General Manager of Benkei Ramen Group) that I could order my ramen with extra fat in the broth, as well as extra fat chashu (you can read about my past gripes about Benkei's lean ramen here).  However, even with a request for extra fat didn't do the trick.  I found the miso ramen was still too lean, and lacked seasoning.  The Chashu itself was way too lean for my liking as well.  Whatever recipe Benkei had is now long and gone.  It used to look like this.  The explaination I got several times was that people on the west coast are more health conscious and there's no market for the style of ramen I like.  %$*&! damn granola eating, tree hugging hippies.

The gyoza were good, loads of garlic in these suckers so no kissing after some of these.

So, this visit spawned two disappointing revalations:  Peko Ramen is now only abailable at the Robson location, and the Miso Ramen from Benkei is dead to me.  That being said, I discovered that the shoyu ramen isn't too bad and I'll have to pay them another visit to make sure it wasn't just my imagination.