Another hole in the wall on the edge of San Jose, Ramen Halu is nested in a strip that also features an empty Taiwanese wonton joint, a barbershop that serves up Playboy mags, an Indian grocer, and a place that has its sign completely backwards. On Saratoga, immediately north of Kiely.
ANYWAY, this is our second time here. Not a bad place, but unfortunately it is cash only. Small joint, got private parties on the left side, and open ones on the right. Regular wooden tables. 2 young Japanese guys serving. Good enough for me.
Halu features 4 types of ramen - thick: Halu and Tsuke, and thin: Shio and Syo-yu. What's cool is that on the menu they really try to capture the essence of each of the four dishes. On the website, there's even more detail on the 2-part soup which is unique to Halu. I didn't know this but the heart of ramen is the soup, but I had always thought it was the noodles (since ramen in Chinese loosely translates to long noodles). The soup is apparently one part pork - extracting from pork backbones and thighbones and boiled with dried veggies for about 10 hours; and one part chicken - boiling 2 whole chickens, chicken stock, chicken feet (momiji), thighbones, dried and fresh veggie for about 8 hours. Both portions are supposed to retard aging of the skin, maintain skin tone and luster, as well as to flush cholesterol out of the body. So really this is quite a healthy choice!
Now the food.
First, agedashi eggplant to whet the appetite. Agedashi is magic. So far, it has made everything taste great for me. Last time at Ringer Hut the tofu, and this time at Halu the eggplant. So The appetizer came out like this: agedashi sauce/soup on the bottom, 4 chunks of petalled, chilled eggplant sits within, and on top fish flakes. Fish flakes are thin, thin flakes of fish (but you won't recognize that it's fish until you dip and soften a chunk of it in the agedashi - THEN you taste the fish). Anyway the taste was great - it was a juicy, semi-greasy, hint of a hit (from eggplant), tempera soy sauce-ish, and overall very soft and refreshing.
We both tried the Halu last time, but this time I tried the Shio. The Halu is a bit on the salty end, but decent size with decent contents and both the garlicky soup and the noodles are thick. The shio ramen was new to me - both noodles and soup are a bit thinner. So each bowl has these basic ingredients: seaweed paper, scallions, menma, kikurage (Chinese black fungus - if you don't know what it is, it looks nothing like the fungus you're thinking of), spinach, and chashu pork.
Pretty good ramen in general, though we'd both prefer a chill on the saltiness. The portion is not as big as other places, but costs only $5.50, so not that bad. Definitely great for lunch as it is super quick and pretty healthy it appears. I wrote a lot up there, but this really only took about 30 minutes TOPS.
http://ramenhalu.com/halu_main_english.html
http://www.yelp.com/biz/ramen-halu-san-jose
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