First Look At Gotham West Market, Ivan Ramen

Manhattan's west side has long been slated for major developments, and Gotham West Market's opening at 600 11th Ave. is bound to bring major foot traffic to the area, especially with names like Ivan Ramen attached.

Click here to see the First Look at Gotham West Market, Ivan Ramen (Slideshow).

The market, which takes up the ground floor of Gotham West apartments, is set to open in mid-November, with eight food purveyors including The Cannibal, El Colmado, Blue Bottle Coffee, Brooklyn Kitchen, Genuine Roadside, Little Chef, Court Street Grocerys and Sandwich Shop, and, of course, the much hyped-up Ivan Ramen Slurp Shop.

"My fantasy is that this uptown spot will get very close to what a ramen shop is in Japan," Ivan Orkin of Ivan Ramen told The Daily Meal. "Which is well-made product that comes out super fast."

Transplanting the flavors from Japan has not been easy, Orkin said. "Everything's been tweaked because the water is different here the flour is different here, and importing really expensive soy sauce doesn't make sense, so I've had to use more commonly used soy sauce," he said. But the menu will be a mixture of what he serves in his two locations in Japan.

Orkin promises his cheese ramen downtown in his upcoming Lower East Side location (hopefully open late November or early December, he said, but "absolutely no promises.") "Downtown is going to be a restaurant, I'm going to have fried stuff, salad stuff, rice dishes... It's a regular full-service restaurant with Japanese food through my eyes," he said.

His uptown location in Gotham West will, in the meantime, feature a new vegan ramen, some vegetable dishes, and donburi in addition to his noodles. "This is really a fast-causal place, a menu that people can get quickly and go get a beer and go to the theater," Orkin said.

Click through our slideshow to see a preview of the Gotham West space, including a tasting of Ivan Ramen's rye ramen noodles with dashi broth, pork belly, and scallions.