Ramen Yokocho Fest 2014

Against my better judgment I attended this organized train wreck of a «festival» and now can only hope that this slice of my life will be returned to me in the future. That said, whoever organized this mess should be publicly flocked or forced to wait in a similar maze for several hours so as to simulate the pain felt by the many fools (myself included) who thought it reasonable to cram themselves into a tiny SF street. I didn’t, actually, get to try any ramen because between the misery of finding parking and eying the snaking lines I could not stomach enduring untold hours for what I could only spy to be minuscule bowls of ramen. Instead I trekked to Union Square for Dojima-​Ann, a much better experience.

They call themselves a ramen festival? UGH, JUST NO!!!
So not worth the wait. The festival was a complete mess, totally disorganized. You don’t even know what kind of ramen you’re waiting for. Just go to an actual ramen place!

A review that is long overdue… Where do I even begin… this was seriously the worst food experience I’ve ever had. It was like a nightmare that never ended.
2 words for people who are planning on going in the future: DON’T GO.
My friends and I got here around 10:30am (it started at 11am) and thought it would be smart to split up into different lines so we can order from a few places. The lines were already crazy at 10:30am and after standing in line for 45 minutes and moving a few steps, we estimated that we wouldn’t eat until 12:30pm…well that was a bit optimistic because we didn’t get our first bowl of ramen until 3+ hours later. Monta ramen from Las Vegas is my favorite ramen place of all time (I like it a lot more than Ippudo in NYC) but the bowl at the ramen festival tasted nothing like the original. The bowl was half full, there was barely any broth, and it came with a hard-​boiled egg. So disappointing.
4+ hours later… my friend was able to get our bowls of ramen from Horaiya. My expectations were already low from Monta… but this was even worse. The noodles were not even cooked (it was chewy and doughy) so we went to the booth to ask for another bowl… which was exactly the same. Undercooked ramen that we could barely eat after waiting 4+ hours for! My other friend was waiting in the ramen burger line and she was far from the front of the line after 4+ hours. She left with nothing…
At this point we were so frustrated and just wanted to GTFO from this place.
I can probably go on and on about all the things that went wrong on this horrible Saturday, but I’ve already wasted too much time on this festival. I would not recommend going to this festival again even if they make changes that will help with the lines. It is definitely not worth the time and the ramen isn’t even close to what it would taste like at the original restaurant. If I didn’t make myself clear the first time… DO NOT GO HERE!!! TRUST ME.

Ramen is fine, Tried Tatsunoya, Mehon and Mattou Spicy Ramen.
Get there by 10:15am, Just want to see where the vendor are located.
I should have start line up at tatsunoya at that point, geez 15 minutes pass, already
like 100 if not 1000 line up there already, ok I will line up at 10:30 get my first bowl 1 and half hour later at 12:00pm, Finish it in 6 minutes, go to Mehon line, by that time there 3 lines near Laguna and post street, (Tatsunoya, Mehon and Ramen Burger) 2 hours later they add another line next to ramen burger (the spicy miso line) that really chaotic.
I wait for 3 hours, read a book, check email, at 3:45 get my Mehon bowl. Then go to Mattou Spicy ramen line which is the shortest of the 3, and then they split out with a non-​spicy line, got my bowl of ramen at 5:30pm, Gosh, it is almost like San Francisco street food festival all over again, (the first year I got that is that crazy!),
2 Tonkoksu bowl is great, especially Tatsunoya one.
Ramen Festival should be by itself no body care about the other stuff, (cosplay girl and the food truck). The Yellow shirt volunteers are absolutely overwhelmed by the crowd,

Cluster — -!
Reminding me of the old days of camping out for concert tix, this event succeeded in creating a mob of confused people… add hungry confused people.
Arriving around 12:30 pm, I quickly found the end of a line… note A LINE, as there were no instructions and the sign-​holding girls were unable to direct attendees to the back of the line.
Following the trail of a line took me to Iroha in the center of the Buchanan St. Plaza. After waiting 90 minutes, I reached a map-​holding girl (map = steno pad with pen sketches for where the line went from her location). She instructed us to follow the gray duct tape one the floor and estimated the wait to be another 90 minutes.
A few minutes later two ramen bearing friends stopped to speak with my line neighbors. They told us that they got in line at 10:55 am (event started at 11 am) and were just leaving at 2 pm. When they reached the cashier’s table at the top of the block, they bought tickets for the various stands before actually waiting AGAIN for their purchases. After doing the math, my guesstimate was that I wouldn’t be slurping anything until 3:30 to 4 pm. Having dinner plans, I disgustedly left the line muttering, «It’s not worth it!»
While walking to my car, I noticed that all restaurants on my path back to the Kaiser garage had lines out their doors including the Burger King on Fillmore and Post.
*** Tips to organizers for next time
1. Rope off each stand — this will prevent line cutters. Fortunate that there were no fisticuffs. The cutting obviously lengthened the wait for those who actually stood in line the entire time
2. Presell — offer presell tix for the various stands; numbering them would make it more fair for diehard fans.
3. Number system — hand out numbers, again to prevent hoarders and cutters. Group them in batches of 50 (sports autograph format) and vendors can call customers in groups to pick up. Attendees can walk around the other booths or stores while waiting.
Until you get it together, you’ll be doing a disservice to your reputation.
PS Had three packs of Nissin (miso tonkotsu, black garlic oil, and original) during the week to satisfy that ramen craving!

Super long, long, looooooong line! Let’s say 3 hours of waiting! Not worth my precious time!
The only real deal to even maybe consider to wait that long is their unique ramen burger, but for 3 hours plus, not for me!
I simply can grab ramen elsewhere! It exists in the city!
Overhyped. Period.

I think most reviews summed it up: Never again. It’s not just the whole thing is poorly organized and overly crowded. It’s that for a 2 hr or so average wait time, what you get is some undercooked ramen with some underwhelming soup, in a disposal plastic bowl. None of these is appealing in any way.
You could have spent that time waiting for Ramen Dojo instead!

We planned all along to go to Ramen Street on Sunday and after reading all the Unilocal reviews from Saturday, I was hoping that Ramen Yokocho would learn from the insane crowds, the horrific lines and would attempt to do a better job of crowd control the next day.
It seemed they tried, but still failed. We arrived early, so finding parking wasn’t an issue. There weren’t many people yet when we got there, so we split-​up and stood in front of the ramen we were interested in. Once they blocked the street, they attempted to move each line individually, which would have worked except people started cutting-​in line, so a lot of folks who had been waiting got pushed back a bit. Regardless, we were all close enough to the front of our respective lines that we got our ramen without too much trouble. The Tonkotsu ramen from Tatsunoya was flavorful, the ramen burger was good and so was Men Oh. The Spicy Miso ramen was ok, but their noodles were odd at best.
Holding Ramen Street the same time as the J-​Pop Festival makes no sense. Japantown just can’t accommodate that many people in such a small vicinity. I agree that the booths should have been spread-​out more and the lines needed some type of control. Heck, any type of organization would have been in improvement.
After slurping down our ramen, we walked around J-​Town for awhile and went to check-​out the food trucks too. As I looked back a couple of hours later, the lines seemed endless. So glad we came early!!! There has to be a better, more organized way of hosting this, with the number of ramen lovers in the Bay Area. Now that I tried it, I’m good. No need to put-​up with the insanity again. Too bad, since it’s a good concept and obviously very popular.

DON’T GO! If you like waiting in line for 3 hours for a bowl of $ 8 ramen then be my guest, wait in line for 3 hours. I didn’t but my sis did. An entire block + more people in traffic with cars waiting in line for ramen, no thanks. Then another section had animé type stuff, which wasn’t too too crowded. The food truck line was crowded too, I estimated 45 minute wait for ordering food, no thank you again. All the restaurants in J-​Town had a line out the door, which is great for them because there’s never anyone here. You couldn’t even try to walk through the mall, much much too crowded. We left after an hour and went to Café Bunn Mi to eat. The table next to us said this is way better than ramen fest, I would have to agree. I heard people were there since 8am.
If you want to go, get there a couple hours in advanced.

Four stars because Jonathan W waited 2.5 hours in line for me! * hearts *
The ramen burger was good.
The spicy miso ramen sucks.

What a fail. We arrived around 1PM on Saturday. Thankgod we parked far away and took the 38 bus in. We got off at the Laguna bus stop and attempted to walk down Post. People were actually scaling the walls to get out of the sea of not-​moving people and walk on top of the ledge. There was no crowd control: The lines for the ramen were so long that they organically made their way down the sidewalks people were trying to walk through causing a disaster of an experience.
After we fought our way through the crowds, we went down the stairs by the pagoda and jumped into our friends car who was stuck in line for the Kabuki theater parking garage (I doubt there was any parking in there. Just a long line of not-​moving cars waiting for something to open up.) We and all the rest of the Ramen Street rejects made our way down to the Marina for the rest of the day.
I am glad this was so popular and very disappointed we didn’t get to enjoy it. Hopefully organizers will find either a different venue or schedule it for many more days to control the crowd.

The ramen was not worth it. My boyfriend and I arrived at 10:50 and it took us 2hrs 50mins to get our ramen from the Men Oh booth (the Tokushima ramen). Even though the event is supposed to start at 11:00, the Men Oh booth did not start selling until around 11:20 or later. We had friends who arrived around 11:30 and it took them 5hrs to get their Spicy Miso ramen. The Tokushima’s broth was really flavorful, which was what we expected from the description on the flyer. It was definitely not yummy enough to justify an almost 3hr wait though.
The Spicy Miso was a HUGE disappointment. The broth was pretty bland and the toppings didn’t do too much to help the ramen overall. Some of my friends didn’t even want to finish their’s, despite the amount of time they waited. I probably wouldn’t be willing to wait even 30minutes for this one.
The ramen was $ 8 for a slightly small bowl, which isn’t bad for a festival. Neither of the booths that we experienced limited the amount of bowls that you could buy. If you have a group of people, I recommend splitting up into different lines so that you can all try more than one type.
If you go behind the booths, you can see how the ramen bowls and ramen burger are made.
I would give this event a 2 – 3 stars if it was just based on the ramen and the wait. However, the thing that made this event a 1 star is how disorganized it was. When we arrived at 10:50, each line had someone at the very end holding a sign that said ‘End of the Line’ for that particular booth. It was already packed at this point but you could still see the distinct lines (some lines went East and some went West). We were on the West side and sometime around 11:30, volunteers tried to make borders for each line with different colored duct tape. The volunteers themselves got confused with the way the lines were going. They tried merging two of the lines because they thought it was just one big spread out line.
Once you get closer to the booths, the lines get even more confusing. The color of the duct tape for the lines changes. Then once they start selling tickets for the ramen, a new ‘pick up’ line is formed for each booth. For Men Oh, they were selling tickets a lot faster than they were making the bowls of the ramen. One of the JPop Summit workers/​volunteers had to tell them to stop selling the tickets until they caught up with the ones they already sold.
I hope that they make at least some improvements before they open on Sunday. Or if a lot less people happen to show up. Otherwise, it’s not really worth checking out unless one of your hobbies is waiting in line.

Yes, I’m joining the league of angry 1-​star-​reviewers here. We arrived at the festival around 11:30am, and it was already so crowded that even walking was difficult — we were simply being pushed forward by the crowd.
It was obvious, even weeks beforehand, that there would be way too many people attending this festival. The organizers showed a ridiculous lack of foresight — when 3200+ people click «attending» on a Facebook event, and when this includes 30 of my own friends, this means you should be changing the event by issuing tickets, or controlling the number of people somehow. There were not even enough tables/​chairs for everyone to sit… Resulting in people sitting down everywhere along the curbs and in front of buildings.
Although you could see that people were trying to keep in good spirits, about 20% of the crowd just looked angry the entire time, which brought my spirits down as well. After turning the corner onto the street and seeing the huge crowd, we started heading towards the ramen stands… Only to immediately turn back after multiple people told us that the wait was over 2 hours long. We ended up standing in line for about 20 minutes at the nearest food truck and sat down to eat our food. We stayed there for another hour or two just because we had made the effort to go all the way out to Japantown, but the crowd never died down (we left around 2:30).
The sole redeeming factor about this festival was the JPop drink, which was delicious. They have two flavors, white peach and grapefruit, for $ 4 each. They actually pour out the drink from the bottle into a cup with ice. Both flavors were sweet and refreshing, but the peach one was a little overly sweet for me.
Bottom line: Do NOT waste your time at this festival. The concept is nice, but there were just too many people. If this happens next year, there is some serious revamping that needs to be done.

The lines were swirly twirly and quite contrary, it wrapped around each booth like a scrambled up rainbow. I felt sorry for me because I didn’t get a single strand of noodle into my mouth. But I also felt sorry for those who got a bowl of noodles, as I talked to some people with ramen said it took HOURS. Everywhere I looked, people who made out with ramen had Crazy Eyes! You know the girl from «Orange is the New Black», whose eyeballs always looks like it’s popping out of her eye sockets? Yea, I’d be that way too if I had to wait HOURS to hold that bowl of ramen.
This little thing called RAMEN brought in a stampede of people, those that were defeated by the booths ended up lining up at the restaurants. However, each and every place were bleeding lines out the door and even some wrapped around corners! I guess the positive thing about that is at least you know where you’ll end up at.
Besides the god awful food lines, there was J-​pop on the stage. The all girl band sang some pretty hard core songs and the drummer swished her bobbed hairdo left and right and beat the hell out of those drums! Pretty freaking cool. After that show ended, there was a campy talent show that consisted of contestants dressed in their favorite anima character. Both performances that we watched were quite entertaining. The stage acts gets 5 STARS.
We got there at 330 and left hungry at 530. We parked all the way up the hill on Gough Street and hiking back just made us more hungry. So, with J-​pop fresh on mind, we headed to San Mateo for our ramen fix. Everyone from the festival had stolen our idea because… Dojo Ramen, Ramen Parlor, Santa Ramen, Ramen Izakaya and a new place called Hannabi Japanese Ramen and Curry were all packed out the door. At this point, Chinese food was sounding better and better! But we didn’t give up and ended up driving to Union City for Oh Meh Tokishima Ramen! Yea, we still had to wait 15 – 20 minutes because more festival goers had stolen our idea and traveled to Union City for ramen!
Ramen Festival turned this weekend into a ramen Hells Kitchen for the entire Bay Area! Next year, I’ll be sure to stay away, stay far far away from ramen during Ramen Festival weekend.

NEVER AGAIN. It opens at 11 and I was there at 10:30…as were about 2000 people. After 1.5 hours I never even saw a bowl of ramen… and the event organization was simply horrifying.
Never again. NEVER AGAIN!

This actually was not a real festival, but a psychological experiment, designed to see how long people would wait in line for something that normally is associated with «instant» food.
Next week, in LA, the experiment will be a fake festival for diet hot pockets. Expect twice the crowd.
The real questions are not whether the ramen from Japan is better than anything from the US (if you’ve been to Japan, you already know that answer). The real questions are:
1. what takes so long to serve a bowl of ramen? i make it in 3 minutes at home. and that’s the good frozen kind.
2. why do people (especially in groups) choose to stay in line for hours rather than just do something else with their weekend?
3. why wasn’t there disaster coverage of this event on CNN?
4. what adjustments will be made for sunday by the organizers? If any???

This review is for the first Ramen Festival in San Francisco. We actually got to try the rich Men Oh ramen — chewy noodles, very rich but not oily tonkatsu broth, and mouth-​watering pork thats still juicy. $ 10 for a small bowl with extra pork. We definitely got lucky here — basically here’s what we did
We had friends who showed up early and staked out the lines. They brought their family and did a divide and conquer approach — since each of the six food stands had a separate line. They ordered food for each other and coordinated by text and phone. We spotted them from the Ichiban Kan door steps, which was elevated and made spotting easier. Our friends managed to help us sneak into the Men Oh line.
The ramen I give five stars and my hats off to the Men Oh company. However, like other reviewers, logistics were an absolute nightmare with shortage of volunteers and lack of clarity where the various lines started. –2 stars for the event organizers. I saw hordes of people on both sides of Post street, converging toward the little six ramen stands in the center. The few folks wearing yellow tee shirts were volunteers, but they were clearly overwhelmed. One girl held an «end of line starts here» sign but she lost track of the line and admitted to us that she was as lost as the rest of us.
Despite these logistic headaches, the crowds themselves were well behaved and folks genuinely tried to have fun. A lot of folks dressed up in animé characters too. There were supposedly food trucks located near the event, and I did see folks with fried octopus and ice cream.

Sadly disappointed… I was excited about this event. The idea of a Ramen Festival is great however, it was a complete failure. Admission was free (thank goodness!), you just had to pay $ 8/​bowl of ramen.
1. Lack of organization — the lines were ridiculously long. Although each vendor had a volunteer hold up a sign for their shop, some of the lines for the shops were so long that it caused confusion for customers. Instead of putting all the ramen shops in one big section, they should have sectioned it off.
2. Inefficient — many of the volunteers working at the event were high school kids.
3. Dining area — it was non-​existent. People just sat on the benches along the shops on Buchanan Street or Peace Plaza. Some people just stood eating their ramen, which is what we did.
There were six ramen vendors: Monta (Las Vegas), Men-​Oh (San Francisco), Fujin Ramen, Tatsunoya, Mattou Seimen (Los Angeles), and Horaiya (Japan). We tried Monta’s Tonkotsu ramen and our friend also tried Fujin Ramen’s ramen burger. Monta’s soup base was creamy and light, but the ramen wasn’t al dente. As for Fujin’s ramen burger, my friend said the ramen was soggy. They must have been rushing to get the food out.
Overall, standing in line for 2−½ hours was not worth it! However, we did meet some nice people standing in line. If I could give «0» stars, I would.

Cluster F… We arrived around 11:30am and couldn’t even get close enough to Ramen Street to take a peek. There were so many people, it was literally like sardines in a can. «Lines» were all over the place. There didn’t seem to be a start or an end to them. It was just a mass of people… It was ridiculous.
My suggestion for improvement would be to sell admission…

You are lucky if you manage to get to try ONE bowl of ramen. Festival started at 11 AM and ramen lines were already over an hour wait. It was chaos trying to navigate through the crowds. The lines for the ramen were indistinguishable so they really just looked like one large mass of people. We got to the end of a line and the volunteer said it’d be about a 2-​hour wait. Fiiiiiine, might as well for the novelty. Once we reached the 2.5-hour mark, we were only a little over halfway to the booth. Why we stuck it out for 3.5 hours, we will never know… The girls in front of us were encouraging us to not give up and bounce but we did. THANK GOODNESS WE LEFT. Later we discovered the lines you originally wait in are to get tickets for the ramen and then you’d have to wait in another line to actually get your ramen. Holy shit. At our rate, we might have gotten our tickets after 5 hours.
Forget about sending someone out to grab snacks while waiting in line. You’ll be wiggling through the crowds and the lines for the food trucks and other eateries were long as well.
If you need to use the bathroom, get in the bathroom line 30 minutes before you REALLY need to go.
If you LOVE ramen with all of your heart and are willing to dedicate a day to obtaining THE bowl of ramen for $ 8, go to Ramen Street. Bring snacks, limit caffeine intake, wear sunscreen, and maybe even bring a lawn chair.