Jimi Patterson Photos
The scene at “Doom Noodle,” inside Firehouse 12.
Jordan Waters remembers the first time he ate ramen. It wasn’t at Blue Ginger, where acclaimed Chef Ming Tsai has proclaimed it his favorite midnight snack. Or New York’s Ippudo or Momofuku, where glimmering designer bowls fetch a small fortune. Or even Hamden’s decidedly lukewarm Sono Bana, perhaps the only place around New Haven where one can pick up ramen for a quick dinner.
Nope. It was at home, it was from a package, and it wasn’t to be underestimated.
“I think packaged ramen is really good — there’s definitely a time and a place for it,” he reflected in a recent interview on WNHH radio’s “Kitchen Sync.” “I’m not saying that’s what we shoot for [when cooking] … but it feeds people all over the world. There’s something to be said for food like that. That’s another thing about soup — taking ingredients and extracting as much as you can out of them. Soup goes a long way.”
Jimi Patterson Photos
That affinity for feeding large groups of people, and for the comfort it inevitably conveys, led him to help found Doom Noodle, a new ramen pop-up at Firehouse 12 that he runs with artist and business manager Molly Kennedy (pictured below).
Everything about Doom Noodle, the funny, slightly apocalyptic name included, is about forging and growing community in a place where young transplants arrive with none. Brought to New Haven through their significant others — Waters’ girlfriend Jessi Dinan, a biomedical engineer, and Kennedy’s boyfriend Jon Watanabe of If Jesus Had Machine Guns — the two credit Doom Noodle with their newfound affection for the city, where it has taken a small village to get the pop-up off the ground.
That’s the kind of community you build with food “that’s so damn comforting,” Waters was quick to add. While the two pinpoint the definitive start of their ramen journey to picking up “a million cases of noodles” in New Jersey, putting them all on the same credit card, and getting back on i‑95 to drive home, they add that Doom Noodle would not have happened — at least not in the same capacity — without New Haven’s larger music and food community, many members of which are transplants themselves.
Safety Meeting Records’ Carlos Wells and the Mountain Movers’ Kryssi Battalene offered up a Sunday evening spot at Firehouse 12, where they both work. Tomb and Thirst’s Kevin Wigginton suggested that the two might want a doorman incase the spot filled up. Ross Menze and ROIA’s Samantha Shapland stepped up as freelance cooks. Kennedy’s friend Audrey Collins drove in from Boston for the evening.
“It was this overwhelming envelope of people coming up to us and wanting to help,” Kennedy said, a smile breaking across her face.
“It Always Came Back To Ramen”
For the duo’s 250-plus visitors each Sunday, it’s a perfected pork-and-shellfish-based broth — there’s a miso version for vegetarians — paired with springy noodles, corn, scallions, nori and a slow-poached egg, that incentivizes the hike to Firehouse 12.
In each steaming, painstakingly arranged bowl are also stories upon stories of why ramen — not another soup, or a prix fixe menu, or Vietnamese cuisine that Kennedy learned to cook while studying there — was the medium in which they chose to work.
Look into that glistening, deep-scented broth, and memories will stare straight back at you. There’s every bowl of Pho Kennedy ate while growing up in Boston, for which she credits her love of ramen and belief in its almost medicinal quality. There’s Waters’ journey from sauté cook to chef, marked by long, hot nights and gruff orders in Dutch’s Cincinnati kitchen. There are the hundred and one packages of ramen the two estimate eating as college students, or the time Walden Hill’s Jennifer Milikowsky walked into the Wine Thief, where Waters works, and was identified immediately as the “pork lady,” the duo’s first sold-out pop-up night, and their plans for the future of Doom Noodle.
Molly Kennedy Photo
“We talked about a lot of things, but it always came back to ramen,” Kennedy said.
New Haveners are happy that it did. Tori Rysz, a visitor to the duo’s first pop-up night at the end of September, marveled at what they had been able to do.
“A ramen pop-up restaurant — any pop-up restaurant, really — in New Haven is smart and welcome. Opening night felt like a hybrid between a cosy Sunday supper and a hip festive scene – delicious, local, the place to be,” she said in an interview with the Independent.
“As for the ramen … “ she added, “Consider me doomed from the start!”
To listen to the full interview, click on the audio below.