Blog Post: Sexton hits RameNesque (and So Should You)

By Julia Sexton

westchestermagazine.com November 18, 2013

I wrote this weekly food blog for six years, from 2008-2014. In 2009, I won a prestigious CRMA (City and Regional Magazine Association) award for Best Blog, beating out runners up in all subjects from big city magazines—Boston Magazine, The Washingtonian, Chicago Magazine, etc. The judges wrote that my blog, "won us over with its big personality, breezy conversational tone and wonderful insider detail—the kind that makes the reader feel like an in-the-know foodie. Julia Sexton gave us a terrific behind-the-scenes look at restaurant kitchens and their complicated relationship with health codes ... And she served up a detailed, name-dropping review of a new restaurant. Thoroughly satisfying and fun." My editors were thrilled—this was a major win for WM.

So there I was pounding my head on my laptop (The Book is due, folks, it’s due!) when I get a little tinkle on my Facebook account. Turns out that the boys over at Birdsall House want to recommend a new place to me, RameNesque in Peekskill. Click goes the laptop and I am out the door. Free!

Here’s what I love about RameNesque, other than that it is quite cheap and not located on my desk. This is a restaurant that adds value—with sheer style—at every step. Not only is Ramenesque’s interior simple and yet remarkably chic, but its vintage plastic plates are stylish and its bowls are elegantly pitched and colorful. Even the bamboo chopsticks that come with your meal have a thoughtful little twist—literally, just at the handle. At RameNesque, the thinking seems to be: Even though you’re only dropping your twos and fews, you might as well get an eyeful.

And then there was food that was all, to a dish, delightful. We started with a hearty eight-piece spicy beef roll ($6, marinated and roasted beef rolled in sushi rice with cucumber and roasted seaweed). With a dab of wasabi and dip of soy, this was just about the perfect dish for that particular moment in my life. All I’d eaten that day were a few carrots. Don’t ask: food writing is a strange gig. Anyway, we also snagged a cucumber and crab stick salad in which the weirdly filamented crabsticks were shredded in a clean tasting, albeit mayo-based, dressing that was studded with black dots of tobiko. Generally, I find crabsticks suspicious—they’re not crab at all, but an extruded seafood slurry (I mean, yum!). But here, shredded and not pretending to be a crab leg, they work as a chewy contrast to the watery, crisp cucumber. Plus, this salad was all of $3.50.

But that’s not why I ended up at RameNesque—it was for the ramen, a personal obsession of mine that has recently been re-ignited by late night Netflix binge viewing of The Mind of a Chef. RameNesque’s ramen was some of the best I’ve eaten in Westchester. The broth in the miso ramen ($9) was creamy and thick with pale miso, studded with two cool slices of roasted pork, sweet popping corn kernels, and chewy, spiral-candy fish cakes. Even better, under the scallions, the halves of hard-boiled eggs, and sheets nori, were piles of bouncy, straw-colored noodles that were lovely to hoover up. Folks, the chill wore off my body and my cheeks turned pink. Even better, I dipped into my partner’s special ramen, which contained all of the ramen standards above piled into a fiery, orange-tinged potion described as Thai style. Folks, this stuff warmed my soul and washed away my looming deadline angst in a psychedelic salty tide of saturated golden-red broth, lightly dotted with swirling beads of oil like a trippy lightshow. Mmmmnn. I’m telling you: run, don’t walk.