Ramen Nights!

Good Life Café & Bakery is doing pop-ups!!!

Photo courtesy of Nikolas Zvolensky

If you looked at our title and thought, “Wow. That’s a lot of exclamation points.” We would have to agree with you that yes, we did indeed use a fair few of those delightful punctuation marks. It’s not that we’re overly excitable, although we do tend to get pretty pumped about really awesome food and fun events. It’s just that sometimes there are things that are so phenomenal that they demand the use of more than just one exclamation point to highlight how truly amazing they are. And Good Life Café’s new pop-up ramen nights qualify, trust us.

 We heard a few rumblings through the community sometime in March about some sort of ramen night event being put on, and they were that class of rumblings that come from really happy bellies. Really happy. So last Friday, Guy took his family to check things out, and here’s the text message we got from him back at the inn: “Holy guacamole! People should be lining up around the block for this!” When we saw him next, he became more and more enthusiastic as he described each successive dish.

 “We arrived around 6:15, and although it started out pretty quiet, the room got busier as the night wore on. It was mostly locals, and everyone had found out about the ramen by word of mouth… The food was beyond what I had imagined – every single thing was delicious and beautifully presented, even the vegetables, and you know I’m not usually a veggie kind of guy! For example, there was this tempura fritter that was unlike any tempura I’ve ever had before. It wasn’t battered per se, but it was so perfectly crispy; it melted in your mouth… The miso soup was sublime and a subtle blend of wonderful flavors. The wakame salad was a work of art, and the ramen bowls were full of so many unique items – the perfect definition of umami. Then, the tomato poke! Wow. The chef used tomatoes as a unique substitute for the ahi you would normally use in poke, and I know it sounds crazy, but that tomato was the exact color, texture, and flavor of ahi tuna. Seriously blew my mind. I can honestly say it was one of the best things I’ve eaten in a long time.”

Kakiage Vegetable Tempura Fritter

Wakame Sunomono Salad

Tomato Poke

Miso Soup

 Curious to know the story behind Guy’s newest favorite culinary find, we called Robyn, who’s helping coordinate and run these pop-up nights at Good Life Café. “Teddy Winslow, the owner, had been wanting to do something like this for a while, and after I approached local chef Alex Crangle about being our creative force in the kitchen, things just sort of took off from there. We started out with a few nights spaced out over February and March, and when we kept getting hugely positive feedback from community members, we decided to make it a more regular thing. For now, we’re doing the ramen every Friday in April, then as we move into May we’re thinking of exploring other ethnic foods, like Indian, South American, Mediterranean, etc. The main idea is that we want to design our menus around what’s freshest and best, cooking seasonally and sourcing as much as we can from local, organic suppliers and farmers.”

 Now, these pop-up nights at the Good Life Café and Bakery are still in their infancy, which means that Robyn, owner Teddy, and chef Alex are still working out how best to have them mature, how to grow them into a local staple. They’re hoping to keep Friday nights going strong, maybe add in another night of the week on a regular basis, maybe give other local chefs a space and place to showcase their talents. Whichever way this team goes as they continue to develop their delicious new pop-ups, we are excited to experience all the tasty results and spread the word to everyone we know!

Chef Alex Crangle at work. Photo Courtesy of Nikolas Zvolensky.

Written by Laura Hockett