Liberty Noodle
171 East Liberty Street
416-558-4100
Complete dinner for two with all taxes, tip and beer: $65
Liberty Noodle bills itself as “a modern and more westernized version” of a Japanese Ramen house. A few steps past the door and I start to wonder: if this is how they’ve updated the décor, what’s the food going to be like?
It’s an attractive room, to be sure. Stairs down from street level lead into an artfully spare, high-ceilinged room with concrete floors, flooded in natural light. But ramen is down-home eating in suitably down-home surroundings. This place is downright genteel in comparison.
It does get the energy level right. The long, wooden communal tables encourage casualness and there’s a bustling feel to the room when it’s full. (Perhaps the good posture enforced by the bench seating invigorates people.)
Though the menu’s pan-Asian riff - flavours from the rest of Asia superimposed over Japanese foundations – isn’t innovative these days, the combinations it lists are promising.
Curry Gyoza ($6) seems like a brilliant idea, sprinkling a bit of the subcontinent into the mix. Five nicely-browned dumpling skins stuffed with curry chicken and scallions look good on the plate, with splashes of curry-yellow peeking through the skins. It’s disappointing, then, to discover there’s barely a hint of curry within. Similarly, the chili shoyu sauce is all shoyu and no chili.
Our first encounter with the eponymous noodle is in the Black and White Noodle Salad ($6). They have the springy chew of fresh noodles, but the white miso vinagrette is out of balance, with vinegar too prominent and the heady, funky taste of miso missing entirely.
Crispy Shrimp and Calamari ($7), tender and moist beneath their panko coating, live up to their billing, but they’re so generically Westernized it seems like they might have gotten lost on their way to another menu.
As soon as our starters have been set down, the mains arrive as well. The server had made a point of asking if we’d like them served separately (we did) but here they are anyway.
A pattern is beginning to emerge: promising ideas undone by timidity. The kitchen seems to be pulling its punches, afraid of overpowering its customers’ delicate sensibilities and delivering milquetoast versions of dishes that should be shot through with spice, fragrance and umami. Didn’t everyone get over this hang-up twenty years ago?
Pleasingly chewy noodles and pleasingly un-chewy shrimp help the Tom Yum Ramen ($11), but it’s not enough. The broth, the signature attraction of the original Thai soup, is one-dimensional, delivering a bit of heat but skimping on citrusy sourness.
Ditto the Vegetable Miso Ramen ($8), which substitutes dull, watery miso soup for the hearty broth of the original. It’s clear again that the kitchen knows how to cook a noodle, but attention to other details would be nice too. Dried mushrooms have been clumsily reconstituted, with some pieces nicely softened and others woody and tough, and carrot chunks are haphazardly peeled.
Chili and Ginger Beef ($10) is a well-arranged tangle of noodles, but the flavour and texture are a woeful mess. Ultra-mushy noodles – so much for the kitchen knowing how to cook a noodle – tossed with gray, spongy, and completely unbrowned beef and bit of snow pea, red onion and red pepper. There’s no sign of the promised chili and ginger sauce. We pout and pick at the veg.
Dessert presents the single unqualified success of the meal, Black Rice Pudding ($4). Beneath an innocuous enough green tea froth lies a sticky bed of toothsome, nutty black rice sweetened with just enough coconut milk to announce, “This is a dessert, not a side dish.” It is devoured in no time. Red bean ice cream wrapped in mochi (glutinous rice cake) ($4) is suitably gummy on the outside, but drab inside. Coconut Cheesecake ($5) soft-pedals the coconut in favour of tart cheese and a dense crust.
Aside from the starters/mains pileup, service throughout is casual and friendly. Questions are fielded gamely, water glasses are refilled frequently. There is, however, a bit too much reaching across one person to serve another for my liking. Casualness is nice; an arm in my face, less so.
As the bill is presented, our server points out that our desserts have been comped. No reason is given. Perhaps because the Miso Ramen went largely uneaten? (Or it could also be because they saw me taking photos of the food.) It’s a kind gesture, but it can’t make up for everything that has come before.
There’s a decent restaurant buried here somewhere, but the pretty words of the menu and the pretty room aren’t enough. Liberty Noodle needs to embrace the flavours it claims to be inspired by, not run from them.
I wish this place all the best, but they're going to have to really dig deep if they want to make a viable ramen shop. There's no shortage of "asian" noodles available in Toronto; to actually do ramen properly requires more of an education, which is a key reason why there are only a handful of successful shops in the city. When done properly, ramen is both a culinary and spiritual meal, something akin to how chicken soup works in North America. So to see the owners describe a ramen shop as "the new concept" on their website makes it look more like they were pursuing a new business idea rather than digging to understand what makes ramen so special. Again, I wish them all the best, as a city can't have too many good ramen shops, but they'll need to put in a lot of effort to make this work.