Vegan Ramen @ Tavernakaya
Japanese RestaurantOverall a decent restaurant, but still has room for improvement… It does some things well, but could use some tweaking to improve other things. We would not go out of our way to visit Tavernakaya, but if we were in the mood for ramen in Madison, it would satisfy. Tavernakaya offers a decent variety of items on the menu and would work well for group outings.
- Food Quality 85%
- Service 80%
- Atmosphere 85%
Vegan Ramen!
Not so many places offer vegan ramen, so when we came across this as an option in Madison, we were interested. [We didn’t remember that we had actually tried their ramen before, at Umami, a few years back—and had been disappointed back then!]
It also seemed to have a quite popular vegan appetizer/dish of General Tso’s Cauliflower. It definitely sounded like it was worth checking out.
We visited twice (June 3rd & June 24th), but will combine both our visits for this review. Our June 3rd visit was a bit out-of-character—we ordered non-veggie stuff to try.
Tavernakaya is conveniently located right across from the capital building. There are a variety of restaurants, coffee shops, and an ice cream shop in the area.
The highly-rated General Tso’s Cauliflower
sweet & spicy sauce, scallions, rice 11
This was, indeed, quite tasty.
👍👍
Vegan Dumplings
Smoked tofu, cabbage, bok choy, shiitake mushrooms, carrots, sweet potato noodles 8
Meh. Not the worst, but not the best. The dipping sauce was weird (Soy vinegar). They charged extra if you wanted a second sauce.
I make much tastier vegan Gyoza, with more traditional flavoring. Seriously, glass noodles in GYOZA?! ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ — C
Edamame
“Regular” 5
This was ok, but unevenly warmed (some were hot, and some were still near-frozen). They were salted well.
Korean Chicken Wings
spicy gochujang sauce, slaw, lime, cilantro, sesame seeds 9
Tempura Cheese Curds
Clock Shadow Creamery white cheddar, spicy togarashi chili powder (3 skewers) 8
This was intriguing, because “cheese curds” seems more exotic than anything Japanese…
TK Miso Ramen
chicken-miso broth, pork belly, marinated egg*, corn, bok choy, scallions, fresh homemade ramen noodles 14
Vegetarian vs Vegan
(“house-made ramen noodles” vs rice noodles)
VEGGIE Ramen:
Mushroom-seaweed broth, fresh ramen noodles, smoked tofu, snow peas, shiitake mushrooms, marinated bamboo shoots, bean sprouts, nori, scallions 12
VEGAN Ramen:
Mushroom-seaweed broth, rice noodles, smoked tofu, snow peas, shiitake mushrooms, marinated bamboo shoots, bean sprouts, nori, scallions 12
This is when I realized we had actually eaten at Umami a few years back and had been pretty disappointed by the rice noodle “ramen” and an underwhelming broth. I started to worry about the vegan ramen and went with the “house-made” ramen noodles instead of rice noodles, so at least one less thing would bother me.
(I do like rice noodles, just not so much for ramen.)
♦ FYI ♦ I read in a cooking magazine that real ramen noodles are yellow because of the cooking technique, NOT because of egg, but most ramen noodles in the midwest appear to be yellow from egg content, instead of lye water. — C
Thankfully, the broth was quite good! The only issue was that there was not enough broth served with the rice noodle version of ramen. Usually one has to ask for extra noodles, if desired, but there is normally a huge amount of broth with ramen. With the vegan ramen, it ended up being a lot of noodles with not enough broth (though you could get extra broth for an additional charge). It didn’t have the right balance, but overall the ramen was good. 
Have you eaten here? What did you think?