Monta – The Raku of Noodle Soups
Less is more when it comes to restaurant menus. A restaurant specializing in a certain cuisine (or even a single dish or two) is always better than a place trying to be all things to all people. For years I’ve chanted this mantra, and advised, cajoled and screamed at chefs to cut their menus in half (it doesn’t really matter which half) if they want to improve their cooking and streamline their operations. In America though, nothing seduces like excess, so this truism usually falls on deaf ears.
Restaurant Guide
Monta, with its 10-item menu and 26 seats, proves it in sublimely succulent form. One slurp, and you’ll abandon your dependency on something-for-everyone eateries forever. That slurp will be of ramen—the noodle soup Japan has been going crazy for since the end of WWII. The words “noodle soup” don’t usually get an American’s heart racing, but the Japanese put a finer point on these things than anyone (save the French), and from your first spoonful you will understand what all the shouting is about.
Shouting (silently, with joy) is what you’ll be doing as the chashu (roasted pork) in your bowl melts in your mouth. As you will be when you sip the tonkotsu (pork bone) broth that simmers for hours to extract every bit of goodness from its base ingredient. Or the nutty, sweet, heartier and thicker miso ramen. The other base soup offered—the lighter shoyu (soy) ramen—also comes topped with roasted pork, along with shredded green onions, bamboo shoots (takenoko) and wood ear mushrooms (kikurage). Slightly extra but essential additions include the most unctuous poached eggs you’ve ever seen—yolks cooked to barely beyond liquid, shimmering in the broth like an orange-yellow desert sun—and corn, butter, mustard greens or kimuchee in any combination your taste buds desire.
A few rice bowls topped with the same ingredients, and the best gyoza (steamed, then fried dumplings) in town, complete a menu that’s a study in simplistic perfection. Monta is the Raku of noodle soups, and one more tiny, but significant, notch on Las Vegas’ foodie belt.
Photo by Beverly Poppe
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ELV note: Why the Weekly featured a picture of a rice dish from a noodle soup joint is anyone’s guess.
After dining yesterday at Monta on Shoyu, Chashu and gyozas, here is how our report differs from yours:
The menu consists of everything pork. The choices are minimal. The gyozas were very good but way too done. There were no condiments unless you paid for them (even for extra chopped scallions). The paper-thin pork was excellent, but little of it. The noodles were thin egg noodles (no other choice). Only regular (not “lite”) soy sauce was on the tables.
And, since we dine out at least twice a week at ethnic restaurants, the total meal was the SALTIEST we’ve ever had in this town.
ELV responds: Complaining about salt in a ramen noodle joint is like complaining about romance in a Reese Witherspoon movie.
gay analogy….no one else can say the food is salty… you must be getting freebies