Cafe Koraku

Gasp, gasp… sniff, sniff, sob, sob, wahhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh! This place is closed! One of the only places I looked forward to eating at in Primm is gone! Koraku, I shall remember your yummy and healing soups, your open kitchen with well-​dressed chefs strir-​fying their hearts out. And the beer, the beer… you had Asahi and Sapporo and even hot sake waiting there for me after a hard day of gambling! Oh, Koraku, you were so very good to me, and I took you for granted. I thought you would always be there for me…
I am lost without you. Hanging my head, I head to the Primm Valley Resort buffet to take out my despair on several plates of crab legs. As I walk away, I lift my head and glance back, a tear forming in the corner of my eye… Goodbye.

I finally got to try this place after many years of passing this location on my way to Veags. I gave it 3 stars because it is better compared to the food court options located nearby. I got the pork katsu curry which was pretty good, but it does not compare to the ones I get at Curry House. I just wished they gave the pickled radish in a container instead of giving you such a small amount on your plate. I love that stuff and when I asked for extra, all I got was a small dish. I also found it interesting that there were hardly any Japanese workers, but it didn’t matter too much to me. I would not get the yakisoba because it kinda tasted like plastic to me and the mix fried rice is decent.

If you’re really DESPERATE for Asian food & not heading back into Vegas then perhaps this spot will do. I’ve been here twice already and realllllly did not want to come back but needed something soupy before the long drive home.
The food here is pretty awful and super over priced. I seriously make way better tasty ramen than this place does. i haven’t tried their other items and i can’t imagine it be any good. I’ve had the following:
— House special spicy ramen: super bland, not spicy & tnothing special stood out.
— Won Ton soup: super bland, too much odd veggies that does not go with this soup, & wonton itself was a-​ok.
2 stars is for the friendly service and the fact that there is even a Japanese place in this outlet. Aside from that i ought to know better next time not to come here unless i’m super dying for some Asian food: P

Oh god. I’ll just keep this quick and simple. This place is hands down the worst place I’ve ever gone to to eat ramen. My family came in to grab a quick bite after shopping and right as you enter you feel like you’re in the jankiest restaurant EVER.
I would avoid the ramen at all costs since the noodles look like the same ones you get from the 10cent packets. The meat was horribly overcooked and the kimchi tasted awful. And guess what? Horrible ramen will set you back 10.99! RIDICULOUS.
I honestly would have rather eaten food from the gas station than eat here again.

They have pretty decent ramen, fine enough for starting our Vegas-​field trip. Of course, it’s not comparable to the ones we have in SoCal (Santouka and Foo Foo Tei get my votes). Hubby had the curry and the few pieces of meat were swimming in more than plenty of sauce. Their fried rice is decent too.

Was craving Asian food on my way back from Las Vegas and I remember passing a ramen place in a outlet mall in Primm. The interior ambience is open and positive but the décor needs to be updated. It was pretty empty when I got there. I knew exactly what I wanted when I saw the menu. I got their miso ramen with ½ pork fried rice combo. Not cheap at $ 13 but what the heck, I was craving it.
Food came out pretty quickly. The ramen visually looked appetizing with pieces of fatty pork, spinach and half egg ready to be devoured. I took a long sip of the miso soup. It was… pretty overwhelming and salty. It wasn’t bad, just not great. The noodles were fine, the fatty pork was okay, I’ve definitely had better. The fried rice was disappointing. It was on the slightly bland side.
Service was good since there were only two more parties in the place. Overall, a decent place if you are absolutely craving ramen, but you pay a premium for what you get.

I’ve eaten here twice before and I always seem to forget that I don’t enjoy this place… But this last time around was the straw that broke the camel’s back. Super slow and awful service. The food was barely okay. Got the volcano ramen and asked for really spicy… It was just barely mild. The takoyaki should have been cooked longer cus they came out extra mooshy.
Next time I stop by the outlets… Let’s just say I’ll have this review to remind me to not eat here again.

So on our drive to LA, one of the places we try to go to get a bite to eat is Café Koraku, it’s on the I15 South and it makes for a great little stop before the haul through the mountains. It’s located inside the Primm Fashion Outlet Mall, which is interesting and totally out of place since there’s nothing in that mall that speaks Japanese, (or really Asian for that matter-​except for that Boba Tea stall). But it’s one of those cafes that you would find in little Tokyo, (they have other restaurants throughout LA) where you can find some authentic, casual Japanese menu items.
This is a place without a lot of ambience, and upon entering you find yourself wondering, ‘what am I doing here?’ Maybe you were drawn in by the showcase filled with simulated replicas of Japanese food. With their shiny hard exteriors glistening with the allure of culinary promise, just trying to make that visual leap between this so obviously fake, almost gross pieces of plastic and an actual dish that you would want to consume can be a mind boggling quandry.
And this is why I take so much time in front of these things; I remember as a kid in Japan, pouring over multiple display cases in an underground restaurant department store floor, running from restaurant window to another trying to choose where to eat. It’s like gambling; which plastic food display is gonna yield the bigger payout than all the others? I’ve made my mom crazy, I’ve been known to take at least forty-​five minutes while I whizz around and drag her to each restaurant display two or three times while I calculate. But at least I’ve never been disappointed post-​mortem…
And once you’ve sat down and acclimated yourself to the jarring surroundings and order, you get a sense of the familiar; the open kitchen with workers buzzing around hot stoves, the soy sauce and condiment containers and bucket of chopsticks on the table, the waiter bringing you a basket of utensils precisely to order. There’s a feeling of anticipation with these subtle displays of drama that I love about coming to this desolate outpost and eating here.
And as is our usual modus operandi, we always order the same thing-​why screw with perfection? The Kastu Curry is an instant crowd pleaser; the curry is thick and full body, exactly like how a Japanese Curry should be. When accompanied with the Kastu, the curry doesn’t need the vegetables that are normally in it, but this version does have a high beef content which gives it’s rich hearty flavor that goes amazingly well with the fried pork. You just want to dunk every bit of the fried cutlet and drench it to get that crunchy and thick stew texture inside your mouth! And the Kastu is perfectly fried; soft and moist pork incased a light golden brown breading. Rick can’t stop talking about this dish, he says it’s the best he’s ever had, (and he hasn’t changed his opinion even after our trip to Japan). Now that’s a compliment!
The other main dish that time and time again we order is the Tenshin Omelet Ramen. It’s actually a unique and satisfying dish that combines a shrimp omelet with ramen noodle soup that ends up being lighter than you expect. A soft yet dense omelet containing with a subtle trace amount of ingredients covered in a cornstarch soy slurry, underneath an egg ramen noodle in soy soup base. A purist’s dream, the only condiments that adorn this dish is scallions and not much else is required! Ramen noodle soups have that ability to instantly warm your body and fill you up without feeling uncomfortable. Koraku is half Japanese noodle restaurant, so it’s no wonder that they have a handle on this national culinary dish!
I have to say Koraku Café ends up being one of my favorite Japanese restaurants in the Las Vegas area, not only because of the food, but the memory attachment it has with taking that road trip; kinda like the roadside restaurant you always go to when you were a kid with your family. In the end it’s not about where you eat, but how the food makes you feel; like you’re home…

I stopped by this place in my way to Vegas and ordered the omlelette ramen. It is the first time I heard of the idea of ramen and with an egg omlelette, but it was a great combination. The omlelette contained small bits of shrimp and shredded carrots. The dish was delicious.
The dish was $ 10 and I don’t think it was worth it. The sweet spot would be around $ 5 ish. I have to take another star off cause it took a really long time for my food to arrive.
I would say check this place out of your at the Primm checking out the outlets and craving some ramen. Just be prepared to wait for your food.

Either eat before you get to Primm or eat after you get back into the city. The food choices at Primm are pretty sad. After deciding that everything in the food court did not look good, I thought I’d stick with the Motherland food. Café Koraku was located a little away from the food court in a nice restaurant setting. The staff is Mexican, but the patrons that were inside were Asian. (Asians stick together like white rice, right? Kidding.) So I thought, worth a try.
We got the Tan Tan Ramen & the Mabo Tofu Ramen and that might have been the worst ramen we’ve ever eaten. So, maybe I’m a ramen snob where in Hawaii we have some pretty effen awesome choices, but I’m just being honest.
Skip this and don’t say I didn’t warn you. Save yourself while you can. Have some standards and go to a real ramen place. One good thing is they have a restroom inside the restaurant. The outlet restrooms are horrible!

I LOVE KORRAKU! They are mostly a ramen house, but the other menu items are awesome too! Used to eat here on a weekly basis when I worked in Primm! I have tried everything on the menu and love pretty much everything!
I am Japanese and their miso ramen and tonakstu curry bring me back to home! The service is awesome and very fast and it is well worth stopping in the eat here! YUM YUM!!! Prices are pretty good and you get large portions! I brought my family there once and we were able to share most of the dishes! MMM!
Try it and you will like!

Can’t expect much of a ramen joint located in a mall on the NV/​CA state line.
Ordered the combination: shoyu ramen and ½ curry beef over rice. I guess since I didn’t have a high expectation of my curry item, I was actually not disappointed. I enjoyed the bold flavor Japanese curry sauce. Beef was actually pretty tender, but not on the lean side. The ramen was just meh. I heard my mom and sister speak negatively of the chasu pork so I didn’t bother be adventurous with meat. I had about ¹⁄₃ of the ramen noodles, and just a little bit of the broth.
I did request for some hot water to heat up my daughter’s baby formula. Thought they were nice to give that in a large container so I could let the bottle sit in the water to heat.
As for the food, I won’t be back to eat here =(

What I ate: Grilled mackerel, kim chee
Visit date: September 25, 2011
First time? Yes.
Koraku is mostly a ramen house, but I wanted fish. The grilled mackerel was delicious! It had great flavor and ponzu sauce for dipping. I also enjoyed the cabbage salad and dressing. Then (you know me and sauce), I dipped my rice in the ponzu. Mmm. The kim chee was pretty good too (and I’m picky with kim chee).

So on my way back from Vegas my friends and I stopped by the outlets to see what is good to eat and found this place. To our surprise it is the same one in L. A… or so we thought.
The menu is limited, not as much on the menu as the one’s in L.A. and OC. The food was OK. I got curry and it was decent. Won’t say it’s the best because it tastes like it’s from the ‘Golden Curry’ box you buy at the store. Usually when I go to Koraku I get other things, not curry.
What I found most funny about this place is that it’s in Japanese and that outlet mall gets a lot of tourists. All the workers are non-​Japanese, so what happens when they get a bunch of Japanese tourists visiting that go to a Japanese café and no one speaks Japanese? (just saying)
Overall, I think if you really want some Japanese food, then you can go here (esp if you don’t care and you’re the «All Japanese food is the same» type). But I think there are other places you can go for food. I don’t think I’ll be returning to this particular Koraku for a while.

I always think of a ghost town every time I come to this shopping mall, but that’s irrelevant.
Anyway, I’ve only had the curry here but what I had was deeeliccciouussss!
My cousins and I had the pork curry and rice (~$ 12) and the side of beef curry ($ 4). The side of beef curry comes with rice, which surprised me a little bit since rice is extra at every other Asian restaurant. I don’t know if it was because I was super hungry or if the curry was truly stellar but it hit the spot. You know they’re doing something right when you scrape the plate with your spoon to try to get the last bits of curry… is that weird?
Like some other reviews said, although it is supposedly a Japanese restaurant there wasn’t an Asian employee in sight. It didn’t make a difference to me… just an observation.

Japanese ramen with not one Japanese person in sight. All the servers and cooks are either Mexican or American. I don’t understand.
So confused!
Ramen was very forgettable

It’s frickin’ mall food.
One more time for effect.
It’s frickin’ mall food.
I don’t know what possessed me to walk into Café Koraku for lunch but I did. I even sat down and ordered some Ramen even after I saw their prices. I can only assume that I was hoping to find a diamond in the rough. It was only after I left that I realized that I had a better chance of hitting the the CA lottery …
I ordered the plain Miso Ramen. I didn’t request a heavy soup base but the Miso flavoring was so over whelming that I was almost bordering a Miso gravy. It was all you could taste — I couldn’t taste the Ramen, the pork slices nor the half of an egg that it came with (I skipped on the spinach).
One the flip side, service was awesome. It should have been as there were only five parties in the whole place and there were two servers. One additional star just for the service alone. Attentive. Friendly. Overall — nice.
I wish I could say that I enjoyed the food as much as I appreciated the excellent customer service.
I can’t

I have mixed feelings about the restaurant.
The Shoyu Ramen is very good (4 stars), but the Sampler set isn’t so good (2 stars).
Unfortunately, I ordered the Sampler Set ($ 7.95). It comes with some spring rolls, fried wontons, and shumai. I can say that all three are not very good. The Shoyu Ramen was good. The noodles had a nice texture to them (not too soft, not too hard) and the broth was tasty. It came with two pieces of pork and some veggies.
The restaurant seems like half the lights are not turned (might be to save energy). The staff is friendly, but of the four people who were working, none were Asian. When we first sat down (Tuesday at 1pm), there wasn’t anyone else in the place. During our meal, two other parties sat down and ate and one person got some take-​out.
It is slightly on the expensive side considering it’s Primm, NV. The Shoyu Ramen was $ 9.69.
If I have to eat here again, I’m getting the ramen!
Xie Xie!

Mall food
Tastes reheated – ramen was not fresh, ingredients in it were cold, $ 10
Katsu w/​curry: okay, but curry is too runny (I know how to make curry, one of the easiest dishes) and this tastes like it’s from a can
Miso soup was okay.
Better than McDonalds, but probably not much better because everything is loaded with sodium.,.
Bring your own authentic Asian cup of noodles (from Ranch 99) and just ask for hot water at Starbucks. :)

Ewwwww seriously… why did I go there again?
I went there years ago and was disapponted and swore I wouldn’t go back. But I wanted ramen after 3 hrs drive =(
Damn expensive ramen… from $ 9.20 for shoyu ramen to $ 9.20 seafood ramen. Non Asian employees were helping me and they didn’t understand when I ordered shiumay. I had to point at the menu to show her. Where was everyone? Noone was here.
I read a review about kimchi fried rice but the waitress didn’t even know kimchi. I ordered shiumay, melon soda and koraku fried rice.
The shiumay was actually pretty good. Not great but edible. I was expecting a frozen shiumay judging by the other food I tried. My melon soda tasted like sour green thing. That wasn’t melon for sure. My fried rice was exactly one small rice bowl. Small and expensive. They did give me a lot of chicken though.
I was disappointed once again. Never again I would come back to this place. I just found out this is the same restaurant as Koraku at Little Tokyo. No wonder I didn’t like that one too but Little Tokyo one was better. 2 stars!
2 stars!
Café Koraku is not yummylicious!